Just for shits 'n' giggles, I put my Xanga Page through Babel Fish. I am definitely not a fan of machine translation, so don't expect to see any of these published (if you want me to write more in Spanish, just ask. If you want any other language, you're out of luck.). I will, however, share some of the more interesting results.
First, I translated it into Japanese, just to see what my blog would look like in that language. I must admit, I liked what I saw:


It did, however, point out my spelling errors:


And, something really weird happened when it got to Spanish entries:


Now, seeing as I had it set to "English to Japanese," I didn't expect it to understand the Spanish. But adding "の" to the end of every word? I think that "の" shows possession, so... Yeah, that gets me nowhere. Oh, well.

So, next I figured I'd translate it into a language I can understand, i.e. Spanish. I haven't read the whole translation, out of fear that it will cause my eyes (or, at the very least, my Spanish skills) to melt and drain of my head on to the floor. But, here are a couple from the first two entries:
"The year of the month of the day."

And, my personal favourite:

The English title is "Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan." It's a show about an angel that bludgeons people (a "bludgeoning angel"). Babel Fish has decided that it's a show about bludgeoning an angel. That made my day.

I just got my passport in the mail. Every page is watermarked with patriotic imagery and quote. Maybe that's to discourage you from ever using it. It has just the opposite effect on me. Some interesting things to note about it: --Everything is written in English, French, and Spanish, likely because we border Mexico and Canada. It would be more international if they replaced French with Mandarin, though (in my opinion). --The Spanish translation is surprisingly accurate and legal-sounding (can't say for the French). However, one should note that for "surname" it says "apellidos." Plural. Now, in Spanish-speaking countries, people often have two surnames (one from each parent), but, regardless of what reactionaries may say, we are not a Spanish-speaking country, so that would only apply to a small percentage of the population. Actually, it would be better to have the English as "surname(s)," but either way, Some consistency would be nice. --Dates are in the international standard order of "day month year," as opposed to our "month day year," with months abbreviated, instead of as numbers. I guess we're willing to make some accommodations to the standards of the entire rest of the planet. But, at any rate, it's in my safety deposit box, and ready for whenever I decide to go. Hopefully soon: I am saddened to say I have never left the country.

So, I was doing an ego search (i.e., Googling "tomensnaben"), and found that I am actually mentioned somewhere by someone else! Here, to be exact. Well, I suppose it's more so my Latin, but still, if I can be cited as an authority on something, even something so minor that contributing at all makes you an authority, I'm happy.
This calls for a celebration! Any ideas?

    ...Is that it's always too cold. In fact, it is often too hot. We've skipped good weather entirely, going strait from the one to the other. And now it's raining--thunderstorms. They last about ten minutes, and ten later there is another. It's nearing ninety. It always irritates me to hear people saying "oh, I'd love to live in Florida--What great temperature: hundred degree days! Wouldn't that be heaven!" No, it would be hell. Have fun sweating to death!
    I'm doing this to test out a new blog: tomensnaben.blog.com. Yes, against my better judgement, I got a new blog. I'm not transferring my back entries, though. I just need to post until no-one cares what the earlier posts are.

     My niece, whom I haven't seen in years, and her two children whom I haven't even met, are coming up here this August, along with my other niece and my sister, whom I haven't seen in the same amount of time. I don't think this news could possibly be any better.

    I'm going to try and bring all of these web logs back. You see, I've lately been daunted by the idea of keeping all of my sites updated. On top of that, I haven't had the Internet at my house, and Netscape just kicked me off of itself, because it's apparently going to be discontinued.
    But those seem to have righted each other. You see, Netscape pushed me on to some bizarre third-party thing called "Flock." I was less than thrilled at first, because it called itself "the social web browser," so I was worried that it would do something stupid, like allow others to use my account or something (I'm still a little worried). But, it has its own built-in blog poster, which I'm trying now. If this works, I'll be able to post to Xanga, Blogger, LiveJournal, and two new ones: Blogsome and WordPress (maybe I should stop getting random accounts) at once. That leaves only Yahoo 360°, MySpace, Gather, and Gaia Online to copy and paste to (that is, after transferring my back entries, which I may not do with these new ones.
    Also, I got an account at a site called "Schola," so you don't have to worry about any more Latin entries. Spanish, I don't know about. I need a way to keep these separate, but don't know what it should be.

     Once there was a kingdom in a distant land. In this kingdom, whenever someone said something, they got a farthing, and a second one whenever someone responded. Some would take advantage of this by being generally sociable, or by raising heated, but intelligent, debates, or by fancying themselves poets or novelists. Hovever, many simply kept a constant stream of pointless--or even meaningless--speach, only closing their mouths long enough to consider it a separate oration, or merely invited others to speak, letting them earn their money without making any meaningfull contribution. Organisations sprang up where people would do nothing but say meaningless speach at each other, so greedy were they.

"What's your favourite colour?"

"Red"

"Blue" 

"Good point"

"Four"

 

    Those of you who aren't part of the kingdom of Gather may need some clarification. In it, every post and comment gets you some "Gather Points" (actually worth closer to one and a half American cents), which can be cashed in for items at various stores, or actual money in amounts of at least $50US--or roughly 3000 points--in a single month. This is ment to make you submit meaningful content--after all, if it were meaningless, why would people comment on it?

     Many actually do, but there is a large community of point whores, who infect Gather with meaningless "game" posts, meant merely to get copious amounts of comments, and meaningless comments--which are likely kept in on the clipboard and pasted into every article they can find. On two of my images, here and here, we have comments that give no suggestion that they have actually seen the image, and, indeed one identical one. On it's author's page, we can see a typical point whoring article. If you are sceptical as to whether or not this could merely be shortwindedness, may I invite you to this image. Here we have (as of the writing of this article) two comments. Note that they are identical to two comments that these same people left on the previous images shown. Note also that, vague as they are, it would be quite a streach to say that they were in any way related to the image.

     How shall we deal with this flagrant abuse of the system? I propose, first, that all obvious point whoring comments be deleted. I shall start to do this after this article, although the comments that it links to shall remain. Sadly, point whores themselves will not do this, so Gather must get involved. I recommend that a button be added to articles, allowing people to report them, to then be sorted out for deletion. After several infractions, one's account would be suspended, and then deleted. As an additional deturrent, a minimum length could be required to recieve points--say, fifty words. Then we may really have a system conducive to creative and interesting writing.

     Well, it looks like I have my blogs synched (save for Live Journal--I still need to transfer my back entries to that)--or at least did, prior to publishing this entry. We've lost the Internet, so don't expect to see much more than my bi-weekly Spanish one for class, and its translation. But, I am nearing my one-hundredth entry (at eighty-six now). So maybe I can try and find some time...

     ¡Mañana es mi cumpleaños! Tendré dieciocho o más, y según la ley, tener tantos años es ser adulto. No tengo muchos planes. Gané una pizza del Power Loon (una emisora, para vosotros quienes no sois de aquí), e iré a una exhibición de Frida Kahlo, pero no sé de que más. Pero, con dieciocho años, puedo jugar a la lotería, comprar cigarrillos y pornografía, y probablemente hacer algunas cosas que yo actualmente haría...

     En otros anuncios, mi escuela dijo ayer que no hay que ir allí hoy. La razón: tenemos que dormir después de un partido anoche. Tienen que arreglar sus prioridades. La escuela es primera: si queréis ir a un partido, sabed antes que hay que ir a la escuela. Si no podéis ir a los dos, escoged la escuela. No es tan difícil. Generalmente, mis clases tuvo acerca de diez personas, y sólo vimos películas en dos (de cuatro en el colegio—a la universidad no le importa el partido, como debe ser). Pero mi maestro de la física dijo que recibió dos instrucciones: 1) no dé exámenes hoy, y 2) hoy, aunque muchos no serán aquí, haga lo normal. Eh, ¿cuál quiere Vd.? Porque muchos dan exámenes los viernes.

     También, noté algo cuándo leí mi catálogo de Hasbro. Muchas veces, tratan de vender un juguete viejo con colores nuevos como un nuevo. Pero ya sé que no sólo lo hacen con los juguetes: su catálogo de noviembre es su catálogo de octubre con una portada nueva. Ah, que trabajadores son Vds., Hasbro…

Well, we started with this:

My English teacher wants to hang it on the wall for prosperity.
Then they fixed it...Kind of...

The pro-referendum signs are spelled correctly, albeit a bit vague: