Last Sunday there was a solar eclipse. Did you miss it? We sure didn't. Third-wheel-Kevin, our hippie stoner friend, calls us up like "hey guys wanna grab some beers and go watch the eclipse from the top of a mountain?!" and like proper acclimated Californians we said "for sure dude, that sounds totally rad!"
It sort of happened like that....
Hey! Where's the eclipse?
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| it's not in my butt pocket |
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| not over here |
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| hmmmmm |
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| There it is! |
After a few attempts of staring through a hole in the paper looking
straight
at the sun, Trevor (who did his research beforehand) was
the first to discover the ecliptical shadow approach which does not
produce unwanted retinal destruction, a.k.a. blindness:
He also read about these rounded shadows that the eclipse causes (you
may have to zoom in on his hands):
| | So while the rest of us blind hippies were staring straight at the sun, Trevor
was in the background trying out his experiments... |
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Staring directly at the sun does not help you see the eclipse. But taking pictures directly at the sun produces these lens flares that for some reason, unbeknownst to me, create cute little outlines of the moon passing through the track of the sun....And here you are...my photo journal of celestial, ecliptical events...along with 25 handy words that do not exist in the English language...
1 Age-otori (Japanese): To look worse after a haircut
2 Arigata-meiwaku (Japanese): An act someone does for
you that you didn’t want to have them do and tried to avoid having them
do, but they went ahead anyway, determined to do you a favor, and then
things went wrong and caused you a lot of trouble, yet in the end social
conventions required you to express gratitude
3 Backpfeifengesicht (German): A face badly in need
of a fist
4 Bakku-shan (Japanese): A beautiful girl… as long as
she’s being viewed from behind
5 Desenrasçanço (Portuguese): “to disentangle”
yourself out of a bad situation (To MacGyver it)
6 Duende (Spanish): a climactic show of spirit in a
performance or work of art, which might be fulfilled in flamenco
dancing, or bull-fighting, etc.
7 Forelsket (Norwegian): The euphoria you experience
when you are first falling in love
8 Gigil (pronounced Gheegle; Filipino): The urge to
pinch or squeeze something that is unbearably cute
9 Guanxi (Mandarin): in traditional Chinese society,
you would build up good guanxi by giving gifts to people, taking them
to dinner, or doing them a favor, but you can also use up your gianxi by
asking for a favor to be repaid
10 Ilunga (Tshiluba, Congo): A person who is ready
to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time,
but never a third time
11 L’esprit de l’escalier (French): usually
translated as “staircase wit,” is the act of thinking of a clever
comeback when it is too late to deliver it
12 Litost (Czech): a state of torment created by the
sudden sight of one’s own misery
13 Mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan): A look between two
people that suggests an unspoken, shared desire
14 Manja (Malay): “to pamper”, it describes gooey,
childlike and coquettish behavior by women designed to elicit sympathy
or pampering by men. “His girlfriend is a damn manja. Hearing her speak
can cause diabetes.”
15 Meraki (pronounced may-rah-kee; Greek): Doing
something with soul, creativity, or love. It’s when you put something of
yourself into what you’re doing
16 Nunchi (Korean): the subtle art of listening and
gauging another’s mood. In Western culture, nunchi could be described as
the concept of emotional intelligence. Knowing what to say or do, or
what not to say or do, in a given situation. A socially clumsy person
can be described as ‘nunchi eoptta’, meaning “absent of nunchi”
17 Pena ajena (Mexican Spanish): The embarrassment
you feel watching someone else’s humiliation
18 Pochemuchka (Russian): a person who asks a lot of
questions
19 Schadenfreude (German): the pleasure derived from
someone else’s pain
20 Sgriob (Gaelic): The itchiness that overcomes the
upper lip just before taking a sip of whisky
21 Taarradhin (Arabic): implies a happy solution for
everyone, or “I win. You win.” It’s a way of reconciling without anyone
losing face. Arabic has no word for “compromise,” in the sense of
reaching an arrangement via struggle and disagreement
22 Tatemae and Honne (Japanese): What you pretend to
believe and what you actually believe, respectively
23 Tingo (Pascuense language of Easter Island): to
borrow objects one by one from a neighbor’s house until there is nothing
left
24 Waldeinsamkeit (German): The feeling of being
alone in the woods
25 Yoko meshi (Japanese): literally ‘a meal eaten
sideways,’ referring to the peculiar stress induced by speaking a
foreign language
and
that's all
I got
