A faster alternative to peeling eggs

The way I was taught to open hard-boiled eggs is to smash them on the counter and roll them around until there's a bunch of cracks in the shell, then peel the shell off. I find that disproportionately time-consuming (#FirstWorldProblems).

I've discovered a faster way. You know how you open a soft-boiled egg by putting it in an egg cup and tapping the shell with the spoon until it breaks into two pieces? Put your hard-boiled egg down on a plate or bowl (or the counter if no one's watching) and tap it like you would a soft-boiled egg but lengthwise instead of widthwise. Now you've got two pieces, and each piece is the perfect size to scoop out of the shell with a teaspoon. Way faster!

The disadvantage of this method is you need a spoon and perhaps a dish of some sort, but if you have a dishwasher it's more efficient.

What to do when someone is standing in front of the seat you want on the subway

I always get really annoyed by people who stand in front of empty seats on the subway, blocking access to those seats for others who might want to sit down.

The other day, I was inadvertently that idiot standing in front of the seat. (The seat was vacated just before I was about to get off the train myself, and I was too oblivious to think to move.)

This lady moves in towards the seat, but I'm blocking the way. So she says to me "Oh, sorry, were you going to sit there?" Which led me to step back from the seat, give it to her, and apologize.

Some people argue that you should just ask standers who are blocking seats to move so you can sit down, but not everyone is comfortable with that approach and it is marginally confrontational, asking the stander to stop doing something (thus implying that they're being bad). This lady's approach allows both people to save face and look generous by offering the seat to each other, with the same end result.

Thanks, subway lady, and I apologize again for blocking your seat!

How to get people to stop asking you for money

Put in your earbuds and walk down the street at your normal brisk, businesslike pace. Whenever you see someone panhandling or fundraising or otherwise trying to part you and your money, make direct eye contact, smile, nod, say "Good morning", and keep going without once breaking stride. Do this for a couple of weeks, and they'll all start ignoring you.

The earbuds give you plausible deniability of having heard the exact words they use to greet you, allowing you to make your own script. The direct eye contact and acknowledgement eliminates any incentive for them to take extraordinary measures to attract your attention. And the full polite greeting gives you control over the entire script for long enough to pass the other person walking at your normal brisk, businesslike pace.

After a couple of weeks of this, the panhandlers catch on that you're useless and focus their efforts on other people.

How to raise taxes so it doesn't hurt

There are a number of jurisdictions in the world where raising taxes would be useful, but people don't want them to because it will hurt. Here's an idea on how to possibly make it not hurt.

If tax brackets are constructed properly, people whose gross incomes increase will always have a higher net income, even if it puts them in a higher tax bracket.

However, if taxes increase, it's possible that people whose gross incomes increase or stay the same might end up with a lower net income than before, and that's where it really hurts. (If your gross income and net income both increase, you still feel like "YAY, more money!" If your gross income decreases your net income will also decrease and that will hurt, of course, but it will hurt regardless of taxes.)

Here's an example of how it works. For simplicity, I'm pretending there's only one tax bracket. The principle still applies with tax brackets, it's just that even fewer people would be affected.

Suppose your gross salary is $50,000 and your tax rate is 20%. $50,000*0.8=$40,000, so your net pay is $40,000.

Suppose they raise the tax rate to 21%, and at the same time you get a raise and your gross pay increases to $51,000. $51,000*0.79=$40,290. So your net pay is still higher than it was last year, even though your tax rate has increased.

Now suppose that, instead of $51,000, your gross pay increases to $50,500. Your net pay would be $50,000*0.79=$39,500, which means you'd be taking home less money than last year even though you got a raise. THAT would suck.

So what they need to do is have some kind of grace period for the people in these margins, whose gross income increases but net income decreases because of the tax hikes. Maybe for a year or five years or something reasonable, they could guarantee that if your gross income increases, your net income will not decrease. If your gross income decreases, your net income will remain the same proportion of your gross income.

Given the nature of inflation, unless the whole economy is tanking (which it might actually be...), this will affect very few people. In the example I gave above, the pay raise to $51,000 is a 2% increase, and 2% is generally the target inflation rate. So everyone who isn't falling behind will still get a net pay increase. All they need to do is put in a bit of a net income guarantee for those who are falling behind, and it won't hurt.

Further attempts to translate Eddie Izzard's giraffes and tigers

A while back, I proposed a strategy for translating Eddie Izzard's (technically untranslatable) giraffes and tigers bit. The basis of this approach was that the tiger needs to be replaced with something that's charadable in French.

In the shower this morning, it occurred to me that it might be possible to keep the tiger.

The French for "tiger" is tigre (scroll down for French pronunciation). The first syllable could be ti, as in the casual French diminutive for petit. And, if the onomatopoeia for a growling predator animal is reasonably similar in French, the second syllable could be "grrr" just like in English.

Now you're probably thinking (especially if you're Anglophone) that the second syllable of the French tigre doesn't sound very much like "grrr". Which is absolutely true. But it the second syllable of the English word "tiger" as pronounced in Eddie's own non-rhotic dialect doesn't sound much like the very rhotic "grrr" either. Eddie pronounces it something like the UK example provided by "mooncow" here, in a way that I would write out in my North American dialect as "tie-guh". The fact that the English word "tiger" contains a G and an R seems to be enough to carry the charade in non-rhotic English, so I see no reason why it wouldn't work in French. (I don't know if the French sound in the second syllable of tigre can be defined as rhotic or not because I never paid enough attention to my phonetics unit, but the French R is certainly more growly like a tiger than the non-rhotic UK English R in the English word "tiger".)

The flaw in this translation is still in the first syllable, using the diminutive ti. In English the first syllable is "tie", which Eddie charades by miming the act of tying a tie (i.e. men's neckwear). The Anglophone audience sees this and thinks "tie", thus making the charade effective. However, any effective charading of the French ti will first lead the Francophone audience to petit, from which they'd need to be guided to ti. It's still a two-step process in French where it's a one-step process in English, and the additional step is significant when you're doing something as complicated as trying to communicate syllables soundlessly while imitating a giraffe.

I can't tell you whether or not this translation would work on stage. It would have to be tested to an actual audience in real-life conditions. But it's the closest I've gotten so far to translating this untranslatable sketch, so I'm posting it.

This year's election night drinking game

Drink every time a riding changes hands. Go!

Let's brainstorm ways to vote effectively while ignorant

The most common reason I hear for people not voting is ignorance. They don't feel familiar enough with the issues or the overall situation, but they aren't about to accept spin or partisan statements at face value. This is actually the reason behind the one time I chose not to vote. The 2000 municipal election happened just weeks after I'd moved to Toronto, and I didn't feel like I had any objective sense of the political environment. If, hypothetically (because I forget what the actual issues were), one candidate said that TTC service is woefully inadequate and needs to be improved regardless of the cost, and another candidate had said that the city was in dire financial straits and we need to cut back on TTC service to survive, I could not have determined which one was true because I'd only been there a couple of weeks and was still excited by the novelty of a subway. Even a thorough reading of the platforms and media coverage wouldn't have led me to be able to make a fully-informed vote.

General social consensus is that everyone should vote. But if you feel like you aren't fully informed, maybe it isn't a good idea. What if you fall for some spin and vote wrong?

So let's brainstorm some ways that people can make good use of their vote if they're currently too ignorant to vote informedly. I have a few ideas, but I'm hoping you guys can help me come up with more.

1. Vote for your #1 issue. What one thing that falls under this level of government's jurisdiction has the greatest impact on you, personally? OR, what one issue that falls under this level of government's jurisdiction to you feel is most important at a societal level? Consider focusing on this issue, reading a variety of comment from a variety of sources until perhaps you feel you can read between the lines on this issue, and either voting for whoever will do the most good in this one area, or against whoever will do the most harm in this one area. Note: I do NOT recommend this approach if you don't have a #1 issue at this level of government and have to kind of stop and try to think of one.

2. Vote in support of someone you care about. Is someone you care about more affected by the outcome of the election than the average citizen? Do they work for, or in a field that falls under the immediate jurisdiction of, this level of government? Are they dependent on a program that falls under this level of government, or affected by the absence of a program that this level of government should be providing? Ask them how they think you should vote. I only recommend this approach if you care enough about this person that you genuinely don't mind putting aside your own needs in favour of theirs. Unless you are closely aligned on all political issues, it's possible that the party they recommend voting for won't be the same as you would have chosen on your own.

3. Vote for an individual candidate you like. Do you find any of the candidates in your riding particularly appealing? Maybe one of them is especially responsive to your questions. Maybe one of them makes you think "THAT's the kind of person we need in public office!" If this is the case, and you don't feel capable of voting on policy, consider voting for the individual. Two caveats for this method: 1) Read the candidate's platform (and, if they've held public office before, voting history) to make sure they're not unacceptable. 2) Try to talk to the other candidates and give them a chance to impress you too, so you don't vote for someone solely on the basis of having being the first to canvass you.

Those are all the ideas I have at the moment. Anyone have any more?

How to make corporate tax breaks create jobs

I previously blogged a rather complex idea to make corporate taxes support social services, with the ultimate goal of encouraging job creation.

I think I've come up with a simpler solution: make payroll a tax deduction. All money that companies pay to their employees in pay and benefits is deducted from their taxable revenues. If a company has $10 million revenues and pays $5 million in payroll, they're only taxed on the remaining $5 million.

Further idea but more complex: different tax rates for employers with different employment conditions. Employers that pay less, have fewer benefits, use a greater percentage of contract workers etc. have to pay a higher tax rate, and companies that provide more stable employment get a lower tax rate. Perhaps there could be a grace period of several years for new businesses just starting out, because obviously you can't provide a pension plan when you're two people working out of a garage. I think small businesses could also use the loophole of the owner drawing as a salary any profits the business makes.

How to set politicians' salaries

There's been some debate recently here in Toronto about whether our city councillors should get a pay raise. On one hand, they already get way more money than most of us and the city is short on money. On the other hand, it would be morally wrong for me to oppose a cost of living increase for anyone. I don't object to politicians being paid more than me. They don't have job security, they're subject to public scrutiny, and usually have to quit (or at least take unpaid leave from) their regular job just to run for office (with no guarantee of being elected.) But there needs to be some way to make their pay reflect the average citizen's situation.

So here's what I came up with.

Each politician's salary is the sum of the following numbers:

• the median individual income in the jurisdiction they represent
  
• the median individual income of all people represented by their level of government
  
• the median individual income of the poorest 20% in the jurisdiction they represent
  
• the median individual income of the poorest 20% represented by their level of government

(For the purposes of this post, "the jurisdiction they represent" means a ward at the municipal level and a riding at the provincial or federal level. "People represented by their level of government" means everyone in the city, province, or country at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels respectively.)

If the sum of these four numbers is not within a range that's commensurate with current salaries for that particular government, then the total is multiplied by a coefficient. The coefficient is whatever number will make the average salary under the new system equal to the average salary under the old system. The coefficient will then remain constant year to year.

The result of all this is that politicians would have an immediate personal investment in the fortunes of their own constituents and their level of government as a whole. The poorest 20% receive extra weight to make sure we don't create an incentive to make the very rich excessively richer (thus bringing up averages) while ignoring ordinary people. Similarly, we're using median instead of mean because of what we learned here, although I'd accept mean if there's a sound argument for it.

Possible issue: under this system, representatives of ridings with higher incomes would get more money.

Possible mitigating factor: maybe that will just mean that their income is commensurate with the cost of living in the riding, so it might all even out.

Another possible issue: "star" candidates who are parachuted in to ridings where they don't live because the parties think they can win will have more incentive to pick richer ridings.

Possible mitigating factors: 1. Might this already be happening anyway? 2. Would it actually affect the results that citizens get?

Improving anti-peer-pressure education

Last week, I blogged about how my grandmother gave me strategies for tricking your friends into thinking you're drinking when you're not, which surprised me because in what world do your friends try to get you to drink when you don't want to? But then I realized that the anti-peer-pressure education I received assumed just that.

The anti-peer-pressure education I received talked about strategies for convincing our interlocutor of our no - making excuses or distracting them - as though simply politely declining wasn't an option. I now find myself wondering if this might have actually introduced the idea that it's normal to peer pressure people, whereas in real life, in the adult world, it isn't. So have an idea for modifying peer pressure education to address this.

On the first day or two, they go through the material normally, with their usual teacher. But the next day, there's a substitute teacher. Rather than being chosen from the supply teacher pool using whatever the normal method is, the sub is very carefully cast. She's young, probably just out of teacher's college. She's attractive and dressed trendily, and very much comes across as someone's cool older sister.

The sub gets the class started off on the anti-peer-pressure exercises from the textbook, then drifts off to the side of the classroom while the students are supposed to be doing their seatwork. She settles in comfortably near where the cool kids are sitting, casually leaning against a ledge or table and looking over the exercises they're working on. Then, in a conspiratorial tone that can be overheard by the entire classroom, she says to the cool kids "I can't believe this is in your curriculum! Do they seriously think you guys are pathetic enough to be obsessing over who is and isn't drinking that day?" It isn't a massive rant, it's more of a bitching session with the students, like you'd have with your classmates when given a particularly stupid assignment. She doesn't make any sort of point of telling the students that they shouldn't smoke or drink or whatever, she instead just quietly accepts it as something people do, the same way we handle it around adults. "I mean, yeah, if you're having a beer you offer your friend a beer. But why on earth do the people who wrote this book think you'd be pathetic enough to obsess over whether they take you up on the offer?"

This will introduce the idea that it isn't cool or adult to peer pressure people, and create motivation by presenting it as something that the boring grownups don't think the kids are cool or adult enough to understand.

How to buy better school performance with one simple tweak

I've read in a number of places that one approach to improving school performance is to offer money to schools who improve, or offer the most money to the schools who improve the most.

I'm not sure whether or not that approach would work, but here's a simple tweak to maximize its effectiveness: give some of that money to the students.

All students get some money. Students who pass get more money than students who fail. The highest-performing students get more money, but the most improved students also get more money. The highest-performing student in the school and the most-improved student in the school get exactly the same amount of money. Maybe the money baseline could increase with each grade, so that you'll never that less money than last year for getting exactly the same marks (i.e. if a D student pulls their average up to B in grade 10 and gets a shitload of money for improvement, we don't want them to get less money for maintaining a B in Grade 11.)

A school can only be successful if it elicits the desired behaviour in its students. School administrators and teachers already want the students to show the desired behaviour, if only because it makes life easier. If financial incentives are effective and appropriate (and I'm not sure whether or not they are), why not give at least part of them to the group that actually front-line produces the results being evaluated?

Shyness as selfish: a more useful approach

A while back, I heard the idea that shyness is selfish, and I blogged about why this selfishness (insofar as it is selfish) seems perfectly reasonable to shy people.

However, explaining the concept as "shyness is selfish" is unhelpful, because what it's really saying is "Stop being shy!" And you can't just stop being shy. You need specific strategies, accrued experience, a safe environment, and cumulative empirical evidence of the net results produced by non-shy behaviour. It isn't a matter of convincing people why to do it, it's a matter of explaining in specific terms how.

Today it occurred to me that the real point is that non-shy behaviour is helpful and useful. I learned this by watching my Gen Y colleagues, who are so much more confident and Entitled than I am. This is useful to me. I don't have to think of everything myself or start all the conversations or figure out what the other person needs. If your goal is to get people to unshy, it would be far more effective to show them why and how unshying is helpful to others rather than just making them feel guilty for being "selfish" on top of feeling shy.

I've heard this presented in loose terms by people saying you should "contribute", but that implies that what you say has to be big and important enough to be considered a "contribution", which adds even more pressure. And there's also conventional wisdom like "Ask questions!" and "Approach another person who's shy!" But that doesn't work so well, because if you're shy the last thing you want is some stranger wandering up and interrogating you.

It's more useful to express precisely what unshy actions a shy person can take and why exactly they're helpful to others, and even more useful to witness this in action. It takes self-awareness and bravery and a supportive environment, but it's far more useful than just telling the shy person they're being selfish.

A concrete improvement to one of the TTC panel recommendations

I've been reading the TTC Customer Service Panel Report (PDF), and I thought of a way to improve upon Recommendation 2R.

The report says:

OBSERVATION 2R

Many customers stand right in the doorway of the subway cars, which blocks and slows down passengers getting on or off.

RECOMMENDATION 2R: Review Subway Door Signage

The TTC should review the current signs that say, "Do not block doorway.” A more effective sign should be developed and used on all subway car doors.

This issue would be better addressed by thinking about why people stand in doorways.

People stand in the doorways because those little red and clear wall-like things next to the doorways are convenient to lean against. It's easy to stay balanced there, and you can even have your hands free to read or text or game. To address this - especially if there's still time to tweak the design of the new subway cars - they need to make the doorways less convenient places to stand, and other parts of the subway car more convenient places to stand.

In terms of immediate action, the best thing they could do install a rail down the centre of the ceiling of trains that don't already have a rail there. (Some do and some don't). When there's no centre ceiling rail, it's very difficult to stand in the aisle, so more people will gravitate to other parts of the trains (including all the nice convenient walls and bars near the door). A centre rail enables tall people at least to stand comfortably in the middle of the aisle, well away from the doors, without fear of losing balance. It won't solve the whole problem, but it will help.

In the more long term, the ideal would be good handsfree standing places that aren't near the door.

The other thing to keep in mind is that it's totally okay to stand in front of the doors that aren't going to open. If I'm riding north on Yonge from downtown and getting off at Eglinton, it's totally okay for me to stand in front of the left-hand doors, because all the downtown stations use the right-hand doors and Eglinton is the first station to open on the left. I'm in front of the doors the whole time, but totally out of everyone's way.

However, sometimes people block doors because they don't know which doors are going to open next. Longtime riders on familiar routes know, but people who are new to a given route sometimes stand in front of the wrong door thinking they're diligently keeping out of the way. If there was some kind of visual or audio signal indicating which doors are going to open next, people could get themselves out of the way before the train pulls into the station.

***

Also, I just had to add this really bizarre thing from the Panel's proposed list of customer responsibilities:

Never run to catch the bus, streetcar, or subway. This is dangerous for you as well as other riders.

I see the argument for not running on a subway platform. However, by telling us not to run for a bus or streetcar, they'd be basically telling us not to run down the street! Sorry, TTC, but that's out of your jurisdiction. We can evaluate the risk of running down the street for ourselves, thanks.

I sincerely hope they choose not to retain that particular wording.

How to get all law-abiding citizens to trust police with two simple rules

1. If you are found to be innocent of whatever police were trying to arrest/detain/search/question you for in the first place, you (and anyone acting on your behalf/in your defence) cannot be charged with assaulting a police officer, obstructing justice, resisting arrest, and all those other laws that exist to enable police to catch bad guys.

As I blogged about before, a main reason for being afraid of the police is that even if their original reasoning or methods are bullshit and you're just trying to protect yourself, they can still rightfully arrest you for assaulting an officer or resisting arrest. If a bunch of plainclothes police try to throw you into a van and you try to fight back because, hey, strange men throwing you into a van, they can still charge you with resisting arrest, obstructing justice, assaulting an officer, mischief - even if it was a case of mistaken identity and you aren't actually the person they wanted to arrest.

So they should change this rule. If law-abiding citizens truly had nothing to fear, we'd be much more trusting of and willing to cooperate with police.

2. If the conditions of your detention do not meet Geneva Convention standards, you get financial compensation. Always. Period. Even if you're guilty.

As I mentioned in #10 of my braindump, what makes me more afraid of the police than of the black bloc is the detention conditions. If the worst a law-abiding citizen had to fear from police is having to sit around for a while, with access to sufficient drinking water and adequate toilet conditions, while the red tape is untangled, we'd have no reason to fear them. But once they start denying us drinking water and threatening us with rape, they become the biggest threat to us - and the reason why I now wouldn't even consider calling the police unless the threat I faced was even greater than several days of insufficient drinking water and rape threats. If they could get back to a place where I can be confident that the inconvenience I'd suffer if wrongfully arrested is no worse than waiting in line at some government office, I could trust them again.

Variations I'm toying with:

a) Financial compensation for inhumane detention conditions is somehow deducted from police salary increases. Not sure if this is logistically possible, not really comfortable with establishing the precedent of cutting workers' pay punitively (what if it was just the police chief's pay?), pretty sure pay negotiations would just take this into account and demand higher increases to adapt.

b) If you're found to be innocent and are detained under inhumane conditions, not only do you get financial compensation, but you get a get out of jail free card (or maybe several, depending on the length and severity of your detention). So next time you're guilty of something, they have to throw out the charges, or next time you find yourself kettled or otherwise detained by police, they have to let you go. Even if you're guilty that time.

A solution to busybodies

There are certain parties who like to ask very personal questions and, when you protest, say "But I was just making conversation!"

A possible solution: change the subject to something completely else that's perfectly valid for just making conversation. "So did you see any of the Perseid meteor shower?" "Would you recommend Inception or Scott Pilgrim?" "Is it just me, or are blueberries more expensive this year?" After all, that's conversation!

How to get Canadians to embrace a 1950s vision of Canada

Lawrence Martin suggests that the current government aspires to a 1950s vision of Canada (h/t Sister Sage).

I've been thinking about the 1950s a lot lately, because the 1950s were when my grandparents were about my age. As I get older, I find myself reaching the age that my parents and grandparents were when they made major decisions that ultimately affected me, so I find myself trying to picture what I'd be thinking in their shoes during that era.

During the 1950s, all of my grandparents found themselves with large numbers of children to raise, so they all got jobs. The jobs weren't anything fancy, didn't require any post-secondary, nothing a child would want to be when they grow up, just good honest hard work.

They then proceeded to keep these jobs, go into work every day and do the good honest hard work, until eventually they retired. They all got pensions from these jobs too, except for my one grandmother whose employer offered them a pension, but the workers took a vote and decided "No, thank you, most of us are married and our spouses have pensions. What in the world would we need with two pensions?"

Let me repeat that: the economic environment was such that simply by working hard, they were able to keep the same job for decades, buy houses, and raise gaggles of children who ended up going to university. And they all got pensions, except for one workplace where the employer offered a pension and the workers declined because most of them already had another pension!

If someone wanted to convince me that a 1950s worldview is beneficial, creating similar economic conditions would certainly be a good start!

Quick thought

From the Twitter-worthy but too long for Twitter files:

There seem to be some people out there who think the fact that the police rounded up and arrested a whole bunch of innocent people makes up for the fact that they didn't stop any of the black bloc vandals. As though mass arrests of passers-by aren't another problem. As though it all averages out. There was even a letter to the editor of the Globe & Mail to the effect of "People complain that the police didn't do enough on Saturday and did too much on Sunday. Maybe they did just right?"

These people should be arrested.

Seriously. It's perfectly consistent with the internal logic of the universe they occupy. They'll think they're helping the police solve crimes.

How security people can get ordinary citizens onside

If people who want to implement questionable-looking and inconvenient security measures want to get the citizenry onside, they need to give us success stories. Give us examples of tangible results produced by previous security actions - ideally security actions taken by the same parties that seemed equally unreasonable going in.

"We took these measures and nothing happened" isn't good enough. (And if you think it's good enough, I have a tiger-proof hat I'd like to sell you.) We need examples of specific and tangible threats that were actually prevented because of specific measures that were taken.

"But we can't disclose this information for security reasons." I do see where you're coming from on that. I myself have a job where I spend my day immersed in information I'm not permitted to disclose. But the fact is, there have been enough abuses of trust in recent memory that we can no longer trust you blindly. As Jean-Paul Sartre once said, "La confiance se gagne en gouttes, et se perd en litres." Trust is won in drops and lost in litres. Give us success stories and get us onside, or stay behind a wall of silence and continue going about your work as an object of thankless suspicion.

How to give career guidance to students

From an otherwise-unrelated article:

Unemployment’s on the rise, you need a skill,” a weathered old guidance counsellor says to an androgynous male pupil in the BBC’s new biopic Worried About the Boy. “What can you do better than other people?”

I wish someone had asked me that when I was a kid! (Or, better for my introvert brain, asked me to think over a period of time about what I can do better than everyone else.) If they had asked me that, I totally would have come up with languages. If they had asked me to think about what within the field of languages came easiest and I was best at and I most enjoyed, I would have come up with translation. Then I would have been guided towards a suitable and compatible career path!

"But wait," you're thinking, "you are a translator! You did land in a suitable and compatible career path!" Yes, but I did it without (and, in fact, despite) the advice of the grownups who were supposed to be advising me.

The career advice I received fell into three general categories: 1) Do what you love, 2) Do what can't be outsourced and will make you money, and 3) Do what not enough people of your demographic are doing.

What I loved was music, but I'm no good at it. I'm technically proficient with a suitable amount of practice, but I have no soul. If the world needed session musicians to the same extent it needed typists before the invention of word processing then I would have had a chance, but in the real world it would have eaten me alive.

The most common examples I was given of something that can't be outsourced and would make me money were plumbing and dental hygiene. But I wouldn't have been especially good at plumbing because I'm not good at physical things that need to be perfect (people certainly wouldn't want their plumbing "good enough!") and I wouldn't have been especially good at dental hygiene because you need people skills.

They were also trying to encourage me to go into engineering or computer programming because it was trendy at the time to encourage girls to go into these fields. They tried to push me in this direction because I had decent marks in math and science, but the thing is about 20% of my class was ahead of me, so I wouldn't have been anything special.

In my language classes, I was always top of the class. I was in the top 10% of the candidates for translation school, and on graduation I was second in the class - but that also meant I was the lowest-ranked person in my class who got recruited straight out of uni (yes, only 2 of us got recruited) and now I am thoroughly unexceptional for a translator of my seniority and experience. If I had gone into any of the other fields into which I was being encouraged on the basis that my marks in school were decent, I would have been struggling, if not failing, by the time I hit the workplace.

Because that's the thing that was never explicitly mentioned in all the career advice I received from my elders: you will be in competition with everyone else in this field. There are very few fields in which they merely need warm bodies, so you'd do better to look at what you're better than other people at. I sincerely hope that anyone who might find themselves giving advice to kids who are uncertain about choosing a career will take this into account.

Strategies for translating Eddie Izzard Stripped: giraffes & tigers

Disclaimers:

1. This post contains spoilers for Eddie Izzard's Stripped. If you're going to see it live and you haven't been spoiled yet, I strongly recommend skipping this post until you see it. (Specifically, this post dissects the bit with the giraffes. If this isn't yet meaningful to you, skip it.) Reading my translation strategies isn't worth missing out on discovering this particular piece of material live.

2. This post does not contain solutions, only strategies. The strategies could be used by a talented native speaker of the target language to translate the material, but I'm not nearly talented enough to translate untranslatable comedy away from my mother tongue.

3. Some creators don't like fans to give them ideas for fear of later lawsuits. So I am explicitly stating that this idea is free for the taking. I doubt you can claim ownership on a mere strategy anyway, but regardless. The original material belongs to Eddie Izzard, this translation strategy is free for anyone to use. If I get wind that it has been used, I will simply be flattered.

This is the scene I'm talking about:



First issue: Does the target culture have charades?

Will the audience recognize what Eddie's doing when he's charading? If so, you're fine and can carry on to the next step. (Just check whether charades is played exactly the same in the target culture, i.e. are the ways of indicating syllables and the nose-touchy "you're right!" sign the same?) If not, that needs to be addressed before we go any further. There are two possible approaches here:

a) Find another suitable game. It needs to be a word guessing game that is played silently, it needs to be recognizable when performed/mimed on stage without props, and, to retain the core humour of the piece, it needs to be somewhat dependent on the verbal characteristics of the words. The piece draws its humour from the fact that mute animals can still recognize homophones and put together syllables to create words. In terms of pure translation, it would be perfectly valid to use a word guessing game that isn't dependent on the verbal characteristics of the words, but that would be far less effective as a piece of humour. So if you're doing this for class, you can totally go for a game that doesn't depend on verbal characteristics and get a solid B- (or maybe a B+ if the prof gives you credit for tackling something untranslatable). But if you're actually adapting it for the stage, don't go there. Better to leave it out of the show all together than to eliminate the crux of the humour.

b) The most awesome callback ever. Introduce new material early in the set that, as part of a broader gag or story, explains the English game of charades, complete with demonstrations, so the audience has a solid grounding in how the game is played. Then, in the second half of the show, bring out the giraffes. This is incredibly difficult and beyond the scope of translation, and it would be impossible to implement in a traditional translator-client relationship. ("Okay, I've got your translation all ready, I just need you to write five minutes of brand new material that meets these very specific requirements.") But if it could be carried off, it might be the greatest callback in human history.

Second issue: Replace the tiger

The tiger is a tiger in the first place because it's charadable. It doesn't need to be a tiger. It could be any animal, or indeed anything that would present a threat to a giraffe. (Lions, jaguars, hunters, alien abductions, Voldemort...) While the tiger was originally a cop-out in that tigers and giraffes don't co-exist in the wild, there is some humour to be gained from the fact that it is a cop-out. When Eddie performs it at least, the fact of admitting to a cop-out is charming, and there's a laugh or two in speculating just how and why the tigers are in Africa.

So the tiger's replacement needs to have the following characteristics.

a) Be charadable - in the target language. This is obviously the most important factor, because without something to charade the material wouldn't exist. You can't use the tiger charade used in the English version of Stripped because "cravate-grr" doesn't mean anything in any language. You need a target-language word where each syllable has a charadable homophone in the target language.

b) Be something giraffes would need to talk about. Humour could be gained in explaining how something that isn't at first glance a threat to a giraffe is in fact a threat. (If the justification of the threat is kind of half-assed, it could be introduced earlier in the show - perhaps on Noah's Ark - and gain additional humour by being a callback.) Alternatively, it doesn't necessarily need to be a threat that the giraffes announce to each other. It could be food, or a shoe sale, or a celebrity whose autograph they want. If it isn't a threat humour will be lost because the silent scream bit would have to be cut, so it might be useful to introduce additional humour by making the subject of the charades something more surreal than just food. But on the other hand, it's quite possible to overload the surreality. We already have a human performer miming being a giraffe, and then miming being a giraffe performing charades. It's possible that adding something too surreal to all this - like the giraffes have an Elvis sighting or something - might take it too far and lose the audience. I don't have the skill to tell when sitting behind my computer. As a translator, my ideal approach would be to present options - say yummy trees, and an ice cream truck, and a Sith lord, and an Elvis sighting - and let the performer use their professional judgement.

c) Be two syllables long. One syllable isn't quite charades, it's just mime. The humour comes from mute animals recognizing homophones and combining syllables to form words, so you'd lose a lot of that with just one syllable. But there's also the audience's attention span to take into account. A purely visual bit like this requires more audience attention than a verbal bit, because they can't look away from the stage even for a second. (If you've ever taken a sign-language class taught solely in sign language, you'll know how hard this is.) They have to accept the charading giraffes, retain memory of each syllable, put the word together without verbal repetition, and accept that the giraffes are putting the word together through mime rather than through verbal repetition. That's a lot of commitment, and if you lose even a bit of the commitment you crash and burn. Monty Python's "Call the next defend-ANT" bit works because they're constantly repeating the previously guessed syllables out loud, but you can see why it would never work silently. Three syllables might work, maybe, but it's really better to focus your efforts on finding a suitable two-syllable word. In other words, even if you have the most perfect charade ever for Eyjafjallajökull, this isn't the place to use it.