"Bewerr from de Hides from Motch!"

Happy birthday to my fellow artist, John Coulthart, who mentioned that it falls upon this day, the ides of march, in comments when I quoted a passage from Milt Gross' version of Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar a few weeks back. Or to be more precise: "How It Got Bomped Huff Julius Sizzer. Pot Two"
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Speaking of mangling the English language, Google translation should be a literary genre in its own right. Here is a blogger's review of the Spanish version of The Birth Caul, my collaboration with Alan Moore, which can be found in English in A Disease of Language.
"The fault, in any case, corresponds to Eddie Campbell to him, who is who carried out the adaptations, but even so I do not resist to the temptation to give a good pull him of ears perhaps (better I occur it in the beards) to the own Moore by its conception of the writing, that in my opinion derives with too much frequency in the solipsismo. It can that stops he have sense all and each one of the images that propose, but the certain thing are that of as much rhetoric the total understanding takes control very complicated of its speech.
Yet, I have left the sensation of which, in spite of its points in common with Serpents and stairs, as it can be that vision between scientist, poetic mystic and of the human life - in addition to the illustrations of the own Campbell-, The Birth Caul is quite inferior to that. And it is it, at least in me opinion, indeed and mainly by these same verbal excesses. As much that the work remains in a pile of dark vaguedades of which with great difficulty some sense can be intuited. And although outside that indeed what Moore tried to do, the certain thing possibly is that for me the Native Amnion continues being a sovereign stupidity that bores to the ewes."
For all I know, the translation of Alan Moore in the book itself was as good as this.
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And while the translating nodule in your brain is stimulated, let us continue. I don't know whether there's any truth in the story that, during his several days of torture, they held Guy Fawkes against the bell of Big Ben wherewith the hammer for to hitte him, but it was good enough to steal. So in the Batman book by me and my pal White, Batman: the Order of Beasts, which takes place in London in 1939, we built up the business of Cockney rhyming slang through the story. eg. 'I delayed wrapping the body so you'd get a butcher's at the coins beside the head..." "butcher's?' "Butcher's hook=look.' (traditional london slang) 'ah, I think I'm getting th hang of this rhyming slang'. Thus at the climax when the poor bloke tied to the bell shouts 'Elp, Batman, it's goin' to hit me in the niagaras!!' (our own invention) the readers, including Americans, would immediately get the meaning. But we didn't count on the inhabitants of the DC universe not having testicles, so we had to change it to a loaf of bread.
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My pal bob Morales sent this link to an article in the Toronto Star: a professor of Hellenistic history gives his thoughts on 300. Well, no surprise to know it's all very inaccurate, but here is the blow by blow account.
"And had Leonidas undergone the agoge, he would have come of age not by slaying a wolf, but by murdering unarmed helots in a rite known as the Crypteia."
"This moral universe would have appeared as bizarre to ancient Greeks as it does to modern historians. Most Greeks would have traded their homes in Athens for hovels in Sparta about as willingly as I would trade my apartment in Toronto for a condo in Pyongyang."

I can feel one a them 'I-can't-stop-giggling' fits coming on. The mighty Spurge gives us another 300 link:
* Iranian movie critics are upset about lack of character development and liberal use of slow-motion in movie version of the comic. Okay, not exactly."
So you click on the link and find yourself at the New York Post.
IRAN BLASTS '300' DECLARES WAR ON HOLLYWOOD EPIC.
"The movie "300," which earned a huge $70 million in its opening U.S. weekend, is "cultural and psychological warfare," the Tehran government declared."
"Iranians, including thousands who signed an online petition denouncing the film, say it portrays their ancient forbears as crazed monsters led by an effeminate emperor, Xerxes, who is outfought by heroic Greeks in the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C."
"Hollywood declares war on Iranians," read a headline in the moderate newspaper Ayandeh-No.
A front-page article charged that the film spreads the lie that Iran "has long been the source of evil, and modern Iran's ancestors are the ugly murderous savages you see in '300.' "
Pirated copies of the film are the talk of Tehran. "
It'll be the Danish cartoons all over again!

Some geezer reported by the NY Times sees it as a critique of the Bush administration.
“Is George Bush Leonidas or Xerxes?” one of them asked.
The questioner, by Mr. Snyder’s recollection, insisted that Mr. Bush was Xerxes, the Persian emperor who led his force against Greek’s city states in 480 B.C., unleashing an army on a small country guarded by fanatical guerilla fighters so he could finish a job his father had left undone."
hoohah, lordy... bring on the next one... Frank Miller as cliche Bond villain. Upsets both sides, occasioning the outbreak of World War 3. When it's all done, steps in and takes over.

But what about the Gecko Emperor?
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wee hayley campbell should post more often.
she makes me larf.