A. 蛮　B. 独　C. 蝟　D. 虹

E. 掻　F. 蛇　G. 強　H. 蝋

It happened.  I missed the deadline.  Oh, the shame, the shame of it all!

Okay, I’m over it.  And anyway, it looks like one or two of my regular readers may have missed the deadline too.  Oh well.  This way we can set it up as a straight one-on-one showdown, mano-a-mano, Theoman vs. Shirley: which of the two contestants that actually use their real names (sort of) will emerge triumphant?

Round A: Theoman sees a hedgehog with all those points, but he’s thinking too small-scale; A is actually bristling with spears.  Or possibly just some really uncomfortable goat wool.  Shirley’s got the right idea here: we’re looking at a BARBARIAN.  Advantage: her.

Round B: Both contestants were wide of the mark on this one, so we must raise the age-old question: Which is more like GERMANY, snakes or rainbows?  (I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure this question was on my final exam for 8th grade geography class.)  Maybe we’d better stick to this character’s other meaning, “alone.”  Last time I went to the zoo, a lot of the snakes were piled on top of each other to the point where it was difficult to tell how many there were, while we all know that the double rainbow is an occurrence so rare as to make us doubt our own sanity.  Theoman takes this round, and we’re all tied up.

Round C: Is a draw, because both contestants guessed strength.  Both contestants are thus equally . . . wrong.  Though our friend Sonic the HEDGEHOG thanks you for thinking he looks so buff.

Round D: And now we get the reverse of the “Snakes vs. Rainbows” battle (coming to you soon as an iPhone app from PopCap!)  Here, however, the decision requires no judgment call on my part.  The elegant simplicity here is the RAINBOW, though we feel obliged to point out to Shirley that this is not two characters but one character made up of two parts.  But we won’t deduct points for that.  Shirley’s on top again.

Round E: This one would seem to be a foregone conclusion, because Theoman stayed within the boundaries of the challenge and Shirley didn’t.  But does that mean he’s closer?  Not that I’ve encountered many myself, but I would think that when running into a barbarian you would get a lot more than just a SCRATCH.  On the other hand, if you fail to swat those flies, as Shirley suggested, that’s exactly what you’re going to end up doing.  Let it never be said that I don’t encourage thinking outside the box.

Round F: Germany and hedgehogs.  Which is more like a SNAKE?  For the sake of political correctness and animal solidarity, we’re going to have to go with the latter.  Shirley’s on a roll.

Round G: Another tie.  Don’t scratch that character too hard.  You don’t know your own STRENGTH.

Round H: Theoman attempts a comeback by correctly identifying WAX, but it’s too little, too late.  Shirley wins KYPC this week by a score of 4-2-2 (or, if you’re only counting legitimately correct answers, 2-1).  Congrats to the contestants: you’re all winners, though none of you can read much Japanese.  But you’re not bad at making things up on the fly.

Are you cold?  I’m cold.  Time to heat things up with the fire radical.  After all, it’s only two days from the winter solstice, the official end of AUTUMN.  And then only three days after that is Christmas–better hope you don’t get a lump of COAL in your stocking.  That would be a DISASTER!  Christmas would be RUINED!  But there’s no need to turn PALE: you could simply toss it in the fireplace and curl up in a nice cozy RUG.  After all, things could be much worse.  You could be out working the FIELDS, or undergoing MOXIBUSTION.  Or, even worse, you could be trying to figure out what the heck all these characters mean.

A. 秋　B. 炭　C. 災　D. 畑

E. 灸　F. 淡　G. 毯　H. 滅

A. 呆　B. 朽　C. 果　D. 床

E. 杯　F. 枕　G. 宋　H. 困

The holiday season is truly here.  You know how I know?  Because Theoman sees an empty box and immediately thinks trouble.  And what self-respecting kid on Christmas morning wouldn’t?  But really, he should think back.  When he first opened that box at the top of A, before he channeled his inner consumer and asked the question every child asks this time of year (“Where’s mine?”), his first reaction would have been one of utterly unmitigated amazement.

Shirley saw amazement in the next character over, but what’s really going on is that this unfriendly character is making a rude gesture, not a rude glance.  Why?  Well, rudeness breeds its like–someone just let off a really nasty smell over there.  Seriously, it’s like decaying flesh or something.  (Theoman knew exactly what was going on here at B.  I don’t mean to name names, but if I had a finger to point at the source of the problem, well . . .)

A Fan, on the other hand, saw decay in C: the ugly Mr. Potter.  But where’s his chair?  He couldn’t take over the town–except in an alternate reality–he couldn’t shut down the Building and Loan, he couldn’t beat the Bailey boys, and now he’s lying helpless on the ground!  Looks like his failure is complete.  (Theoman was in the know here again.  I guess we can thank him for giving the heartless old dinosaur a friendly shove.)

Celebrating his victory over the Scrooges of the world, Theoman decided to head to D to celebrate with a nice steaming cup of hot chocolate, cider, or other appropriately seasonal beverage (can one have steaming hot egg nog?)  Unfortunately, he picked a bad seat–see how it’s missing a side over there?  Now he’s flat on the floor with his old nemesis!  (Before attempting to sit, he really should have talked to Shirley, who knows a floor when she sees one.)

Shirley, ever the Good Samaritan, rushed in to help, of course, but found that she had rushed a little too quickly.  Tired, she lay down at E.  What she thought was a pillow, however, was actually Theoman’s dropped cup.  Hopefully it was no longer steaming hot.

Now at F, A Fan recalled the poor, disturbed Mr. Gower.  Mr. Gower didn’t mean to mix up the pills.  He didn’t know they were poison.  He shouldn’t even be at work at all; he just needs a place to cry.  I recommend a nice pillow.

At G, Theoman’s amazed, A Fan’s feeling just a bit scandalized, and Shirley wants to raise a toast.  To what?  To the Song Dynasty, of course.  Why?  Well . . . because they were so amazingly sexy, apparently.

And now we come to the end, and brother, it shows.  Shirley wants things to be over.  A Fan wants a drink.  Theoman can hardly keep his eyes open.  Sure, it would be nice to close out with children’s heads and the visions of sugarplums therein, but what we’ve got here is trouble.  With a capital T, and that rhymes with P, and that stands for picture characters.  Time to go find some more.

You like bugs, huh?  Okay.  Meet the bug radical.  This little critter is responsible for all kinds of disasters, like . . . rainbows.  And, uh, Germany.  Also strength, snakes, scratches, barbarians, wax, and hedgehogs.  Better get your fly swatters.  Or your story-writing pencils.  Either works for me.

A. 蛮　B. 独　C. 蝟　D. 虹

E. 掻　F. 蛇　G. 強　H. 蝋

A. 試　B. 這　C. 診　D. 誉

E. 獄　F. 罰　G. 誓　H. 誰

Sometimes it seems as though the answers one gets correct on KYPC tell a story.  Theoman’s story seems to be fairly clear, as he got attempt(A), prison(E), and punishment(F).  We’ve all heard this story plenty of times: he’s in prison and, for some reason, decides he wishes to no longer be there.  So he makes an escape attempt–a fairly poorly arranged one, by his own description.  This, naturally, leads to recapture and punishment.  It seems like he’s wound up in one of those soft, white-collar prisons, though, as evidenced by the fact that the punishment for breaking out is just a noogie.  The real question, though, is how he tried to get away; he failed to identify one of the most popular modes of transportation for prison breakers, the crawl(B).  Maybe if he had thought to keep his head down, it wouldn’t have ended up getting noogied.

A(nother) Fan, on the other hand, had a(nother) plan: tunnels are the way to go.  Sure, it’s not easy, especially since he, too, failed to figure out how to crawl–good luck digging a tunnel big enough to walk through.  But if you succeed, you sure can cover yourself in glory . . . except that the character he identified as “glory,” H, is actually “who,” which, if you think about it, has sort of the opposite meaning.  Oh well.  Actually, if you’ve busted out of prison, a little anonymity probably can’t hurt.  It sure seems like it would have helped a lot of those guys in The Great Escape.  As a matter of fact, A(nother) Fan did not correctly identify any characters this week, which means that his tunnel ended not just short of the tree line but in the Kommandant’s office.  On the plus side, he seems to have missed any punishment because of it.  And he sure does remember an awful lot of that movie, which is a kind of victory of its own, I suppose.

Shirley’s story, however, is somewhat sadder, neither the standard failure of Theoman’s attempt nor the comical failure of A(nother) Fan’s–for you see, prison(E) is all she knows.  She is unfamiliar with the glory of D, so she makes no vow(G) to break free from her imprisonment.  She doesn’t even bother to examine(C) the bars for potential weakness.  But, if anyone’s keeping score, she took second place this week, so it’s not all bad.

It’s the Christmas season–time to put up the tree.  What does the Christmas tree mean to you?  Well, it depends on what you put on it, I suppose.  When you put different things on these “trees,” you get the following: a pillow, the Song Dynasty (of China), trouble, to complete/achieve, glass/cup, floor, to decay, and amazement.  Sound hard?  Well at least you don’t have to untangle all those damn little metal hooks.

A. 呆　B. 朽　C. 果　D. 床

E. 杯　F. 枕　G. 宋　H. 困

A. 碇　B. 磯　C. 砲　D. 碁

E. 磨　F. 妬　G. 砂　H. 砕

The website isn’t really cooperating with me right now, so we’ll see whether or not this actually gets posted.

Perhaps our knowledge of kanji can tell us what we are meant to be. For instance, Theoman would make a pretty poor apothecary, because he tries to grind up his medicines using an anchor (A). On the other hand, he might be a pretty impressive player of Go, because he sees the entire beach (B) as his board. Other than that, he easily recognizes cannons (C) and jealousy (F), so . . . pirate, I guess?

In other news, A Fan is back–or is it that he never truly left? As usual, he does his best to test the boundaries of relevancy. B could be Captain Kangaroo, provided that he is captain of a ship, and also provided that he has run his ship aground on the beach (maybe he, too, disagrees with the prevailing belief that ships are meant to be crewed). F is in fact Mr. Green Jeans because he is green with envy, presumably based on his desire to throw Captain Kangaroo overboard and usurp his position as Captain of the grounded ship. Bunny Rabbit and Mr. Moose are blatant rip-offs of Bugs Bunny and Bullwinkle, respectively, and will thus not be acknowledged here.

That poor anchor. First Theoman tries to use it in his mortar, and now Shirley is attempting to load it into a cannon. Well, at least it can’t be said that it doesn’t lead an interesting life. Shirley is, however, the only one who knows a good beach when she sees it, but she is also familiar with the darker side of life: smashing and crushing (H). Also of note is the fact that both Shirley and Theoman seem to favor a magnetic Go board, though the actual magnet is . . . oh hell. Looks like I actually forgot to put the magnet character up there. I instead accidentally substituted a character meaning “sand” at G. Magnet looks like this:

磁

And E is for polishing. Or brushing your teeth.

Anyway, since words seem to be such a big deal around here, this week we will be looking at characters containing the element that means “word.” Their meanings include: punishment, to vow, to crawl, to examine/diagnose, prison, to attempt, glory, and the question word for who.

A. 試　B. 這　C. 診　D. 誉

E. 獄　F. 罰　G. 誓　H. 誰

A. 芸　B. 英　C. 落　D. 葉

E. 芋　F. 苦　G. 芥　H. 若

Finally, Theoman has solved the age-old question: “What is a potato?”  Answer: it’s a rock with grass on it.  I salute him for this ground-breaking philosophical achievement, though I would recommend that my other readers stay away from his “potato soup” in the future, especially if you don’t have dental insurance.  But H, in fact, is not a potato: in failing to recognize that the bottom portion of H is not “rock” but “right” (as opposed to “left”), Theoman made one of the classic blunders of youth.  Pain (F) apparently reminds him of England, and Art (A) is trashy.  He believes that to fall (C) is to suffer, but his suffering was not total: in the end, on one of his throwaway answers, he correctly picked D as “leaf.”

A(nother) Fan’s response makes a little more sense grammatically when one remembers that the way the issue was phrased in the episode was actually whether or not it is common maritime practice for a ship to have a crew.  His potato, sadly, has rolled off the quarterdeck of A and landed in E, the bilge.  Probably not very appetizing, but then again, when you’re at sea, what other choice do you have?  Better than a rock with grass on top, at least.

Shirley looks to lead the kanji in uprising against their tyrannical oppressors, though she might want to finish learning their names first.  But what sort of radical revolution is she fomenting?  Well, she thinks art (A) is feckless, and she doesn’t seem to care much for England (B), which she called trash.  She wants the government to fall (C) because it is responsible for the people’s suffering.  And she called F (suffering) a fall, so perhaps they are one and the same?  Sounds rather Marxist to me.  And she thinks trash (G) is art.  So, in conclusion . . . well, I don’t really know what this movement is up to, but I would advise locking your doors and windows in the near future.

Man, all that talk about potato/rock soup made me hungry.  Let’s see what else we can make out of rocks.  We can make: jealousy, grinding/polishing, the beach, smashing/crushing, a cannon, an anchor (looks like we’re also following Another Fan’s nautical theme), a magnet, or the game of Go.  Hmm.  Sounds like a violent bunch.  Be careful.

A. 碇　B. 磯　C. 砲　D. 碁

E. 磨　F. 妬　G. 砂　H. 砕

A. 肯　B. 青　C. 服　D. 有

E. 朋　F. 育　G. 肌　H. 脅

I see a ba-ad moo-oon risin’ . . .

“There cannot be two suns in the sky; there cannot be two Emperors on Earth,” certainly sounds like something an ancient Chinese philosopher would say, and maybe it even is.  But what about two moons?  Theoman saw two moons and immediately agreed, which means he probably won’t be writing the next Art of War anytime soon.  Perhaps he can find the shoulder of a friend to cry on–I assume that failing to get the right answer in KYPC is devastating to the point of inducing tears.  These two moons may not agree about much, but they’re still good pals.

Dragon had the gall to point out a possible labeling mistake, but I’m going to pretend that was obviously just a philosophical statement I was making about the possible merits of using a supposedly ideographic writing system.  She correctly identified the top part of B as a sweet hat, but she forgot that sweet hats are almost inevitably blue, which means that B is blue.  I’m not sure why she thinks the moon would be friends with a footstool with a tail, and anyway, that thing above the stool is a hangar, being used to hold up the new article of clothing that the moon is working on.  The moon in D is also wearing a hat, but not a very exciting one.  It just sort of sits there.  It merely exists.  What I don’t understand, though, is how she failed to recognize that the top part of F is also a hat, and not Hyacynthoides non-scripta. It is, in fact, the Sorting Hat, about to be placed on the head of a young student with disturbingly long sideburns–as we all know, the Sorting is an important event in the raising of a young witch or wizard (also, this character is part of the word for “education”).  But she did get one right: G is indeed “skin.”  I feel like there should be some kind of myth about the moon shedding its skin as an explanation for the phases of the moon.  Maybe Dragon can write one.

Shirley’s guess was not correct, but she does win the award for best justification this week.  Also, those more familiar with characters would probably describe this moon as “the Sun, but with legs,” rather than “3 horizontal bars . . . joined by vertical lines on each side.”  But perhaps we’ll learn about the Sun another week.

Could some kind soul, perhaps one who knows more about East Asian characters and computers than he does, please help A(nother) Fan set up his browser so as to display them properly?

A is agreement, and H is threatening.  I put them at opposite ends because I figured they might have trouble getting along.

Let’s try another round of the radical game (as Theoman pointed out, these parts are called “radicals,” at least when they are used as an identifying element of the characters in which they find themselves).  Unless you live somewhere crazy like the entire half of the Earth that is south of the equator, you’ve probably noticed a lot of falling leaves recently.  So let’s learn about the radical that appears in the character for “fall (the verb)” and the one for “leaf”: the grass radical.  The meanings of the other six are: potato, trash, art, England, suffering, and youth.

A. 芸　B. 英　C. 落　D. 葉

E. 芋　F. 苦　G. 芥　H. 若

A. 瓜二つ　B. 瓜田　C. 南瓜　D. 胡瓜　E. 西瓜　F. 西洋南瓜

In retrospect, I really should have done this a week earlier, so that the answers would be given on Halloween.  It feels a little silly to be talking about pumpkins a week later.

You all got that we were talking about pumpkins, right?  Good.

Theoman sits alone in that dark, damp patch, his head slumped against a splintery fence post, his eyes still open only through sheer force of will.  Midnight has long since past.  His friends–and perhaps, too, his senses–have long since abandoned him.  But he stays, and he waits, for he knows, deep inside his heart, that it will come.  It must come.  And then, all of a sudden, there it is: rising above a hill in the middling distance, its shadowy form cast against the slowly sinking moon.  He was right!  His faith was rewarded!  At last he will see, he will gaze upon . . . the Great Cucumber?  Better luck next time, Soul Eater.

Shirley, in her triumphant return, tried to be more logical.  She noted that all the answers share one character.  Could this be another one of the Wordsman’s famous tricks?  Or could she find the treat?  Well, she found a watermelon at E, and that’s not so bad.  Probably a lot better to eat than a pumpkin, actually, though if you take enough pain pills, maybe you could pretend it was both.  Halloween is a time for sweets, after all, and watermelon is pretty easily the sweetest thing on this list.  Her “Great Pumpkin,” however, is a bit of a letdown: F is the buttercup squash, which I may or may not have misread as “butternut squash” when I was making this quiz.  But they’re pretty much the same, right?

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, that one character that appears so many times means “melon,” so it’s used in the names of various melons and gourds.  Gourds are a kind of melon, right?  Or melons are a kind of gourd?  Tune in next week for the first edition of “Know Your Botany Terminology” (but not really).

A(nother) Fan had the last chance to get it right, but he ran up against an obstacle in that he chose to use a computer that was not set up to display East Asian characters.  But obstacles can be overcome.  Linus knows all about adversity, and so should we.  A(nother) Fan charged toward that wall, leapt over it, and ended up at B: the melon patch.  Well, at least he got close.  He may not have found the Great Pumpkin, but he at least got to the place where his buddy Linus waits for it every year.  Maybe if they wait long enough they can see the Red Baron.

C is the pumpkin, the “southern melon,” kabocha.  And A is actually a figure of speech meaning “two melons,” roughly equivalent to the American “as alike as two peas in a pod.”

But enough about fruits and vegetables.  Let’s get back to our characters.  Shirley should like this: we’re doing another challenge involving all the answers sharing a common element.  This time, instead of all the words sharing one kanji, I’m going to give you a list of kanji that all share a particular part.  Long-time contestants may recognize this common feature as meaning “moon,” so it should come as no surprise that the characters listed here refer to skin, existence, raising (as in raising a child), the color blue, agreement, clothing, friendship, and threatening/coercion.  Pick whichever one you feel has the most to do with the great yellow orb that hangs in the night sky.

And for those of you who might actually know one or two of these *cough*Theoman*cough*, let’s not forget to challenge ourselves.

A. 肯　B. 青　C. 服　D. 有

E. 朋　F. 育　G. 肌　H. 脅

A. 科恩兄弟 B. 贾森雷特曼 C. 朗侯活

D. 昆汀塔伦蒂诺 E. 皮特多克特

Nine out of ten doctors do not recommend trying to read Chinese based only on one’s knowledge of Japanese; the tenth doctor is a sadist.  But Theoman proved them all wrong, because he recognized the Japanese word for “brothers” or “siblings” and he clung to it like a man tossed overboard in a storm hanging onto a piece of driftwood.  Fortunately, it carried him to shore: A is the Coen brothers, whose best movie is, in fact, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, whatever A(nother) Fan might tell you.  But Fargo‘s their second best, so I guess he wasn’t too far off.  And neither was Theoman, who scored an impressive 40% this week, also picking out D as Quentin Tarantino, whose Chinese name has a disappointingly small number of characters that have anything to do with violence.  That third one in there is a tower, which I guess would hurt a lot if it fell on you?  I might be stretching a bit here.

A(nother) Fan likes to have backups; if he can’t be right about the characters (and, for 4/5, he wasn’t) he can at least be right about which film was best.  Or can he?  Pete Docter no longer lives in Bloomington; he lives at E, and, appropriately enough, has a character meaning “special” appear not once but twice in his name.  WALL-E was better than Up, and I can’t remember Toy Story well enough to make a definitive judgment, so I guess he wins that one.  And he’s right about Tarantino as well, in quality if not in location.  And being a member of whatever generation he is (not mine, presumably) paid off, as it allowed him to recognize Opie.  He can have credit for Up in the Air as well, so long as he acknowledges that it’s kind of interesting that the first character of Jason Reitman’s name in Chinese is also the name of one of my Chinese teachers.

But maybe we should move away from Chinese for a bit.  As has been pointed out to me, I am not a real Chinese speaker; I just play one on the internet.  Let’s go back to nihongo (Japanese) for a while.  Everyone know what day it is today?  Good.  If you don’t, go hide in the corner in shame for a while.  Then, when you come back out, your task will be to find the word that completes this sentence: “Linus awaits the Great _______.”

A. 瓜二つ　B. 瓜田　C. 南瓜　D. 胡瓜　E. 西瓜　F. 西洋南瓜

A. 低俗小说 B. 冰血暴 C. 鐵面特警隊 D. 少女孕記 E. 天外奇蹟

Theoman is pretty good at picking movies: of the five he selected, three appear on this list.  Unfortunately, he is not very good at shuffling, for he didn’t manage to get any of them in the right order.  As for the others . . . A Few Good Men was very good, but I’ve never seen Unforgiven, so I refrained from judgment on that particular year.  And The King’s Speech was predictable but enjoyable, so I’m not sure you can say that Inception really bested it, unless you measure Best Pictures by multiplying the special effects budget by the number of plot holes (which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy it, but really, anyone who tells you they totally understood that movie is lying, including the director).

A Fan, of course, discovered a topic near and dear to his heart.  Perhaps too near, in fact, for it led him to start shouting out movies that no one besides him has ever heard of, like Quiz Show.  I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was actually better than Forrest Gump, as were all the other movies he put down, but I chose only one representative from “Oscar’s Annus Horribilis”: it’s Pulp Fiction, and unfortunately for A Fan, it came first.  It is unique among these movies in that the Chinese title is basically exactly the same as the English one (except, you know, that we have to write it with these funny symbols).

Then Another Fan came in, one unrelated to the first but sharing a lot of his passions and opinions, providing us with a wealth of Best Picture “better thans.”  This included at least one that I considered and rejected–Apollo 13, because it has a number in it–and two that I included.  So I guess Another Fan did better this week than A Fan.  He can brag about it if they ever happen to meet.  It seems that while A Fan felt that 1994 was the worst best picture year, Another Fan focused on 1997 as one in which every single other nominee was better than the winner.  Again, I only chose to use one, because L.A. Confidential was the hands-down winner that year . . . at least until James Cameron paid someone a billion dollars to make it not be.  You can find it at C, which appears to mean something like “iron-faced special police force” (keep in mind that I don’t actually speak Chinese, so my information is even less reliable than usual).

I suppose it’s always nice to know that one has at least two fans.

Another Fan’s other success came in picking Fargo, an uneven film, but come on!  The English Patient?  Guhhhh.  Fargo is B, and it has my favorite Chinese title: “Ice, Blood, Violence.”

And finally, in swooped Dragon, who really should have trusted her instincts, because I agree with her that Shakespeare in Love was better than Saving Private Ryan.  She also picked the wrong Pixar film: E is not Toy Story 3 but Up, which is both a better film and came in a year with a worse Best Picture winner (based on the logic that if The Hurt Locker was really so great, I would have seen it).

D is Juno, which I didn’t like on rewatching quite as much as I did the first time I saw it, but it is still leaps and bounds ahead of No Country for Old Men, which was a terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE film.  As a friend of mine once put it, “I didn’t think it was possible to make a movie about a homicidal maniac so boring.”

Okay, so now you’ve got the five films.  But let’s do something that involves a little less guesswork and a little more close examination of the characters (because that’s what we’re all best at, right?)  Find me the names of the directors of the five movies (as in, the five I specifically chose here) that should have–or at least could have–won it all.

NOTE: I replaced the director of L.A. Confidential with the director of Apollo 13, because there is no Chinese Wikipedia article on Curtis Hanson.  And, as we all know, if there’s no Wikipedia article, it doesn’t actually exist.

A. 科恩兄弟 B. 贾森雷特曼 C. 朗侯活

D. 昆汀塔伦蒂诺 E. 皮特多克特

A. 達拉斯 B. 新英格兰 C. 纽约 D. 水牛城

E. 費城 F. 迈阿密 G. 华盛顿

Okay, I think we’re gonna make it.  It’s not even Tuesday in Newfoundland yet.

Theoman knows how embarrassing it is to be hoist with one’s own petard, so he chooses to use other people’s petards.  But he uses them upside-down, which sounds like it could be potentially devastating to the local mole population.  But I digress.  Let’s see how the Reverse Dragon Method (which sounds like it should be used for something much cooler than this) panned out.  He got . . . one.  The same one that Dragon got this week, actually, if she’s allowed to take credit for getting New York right when she says they’re all New York.  Dragon likes to cover up her lack of ability in geography by saying that all names actually refer to the same place.  She is the opposite of Joseph Stalin, who is rumored to have thought that the Netherlands and Holland were actually different places.  But at least she gave me some credit and figured that I only put New York six times instead of seven.  She picked out A as the Birthplace of the American Revolution, the Cradle of Liberty, good ol’ Beantown: Dallas.

These eastern locations turned out to be an oddly idiosyncratic bunch.  New England, for example, starts with the character meaning “new” (it is literally that character plus the characters used for “England”), but New York doesn’t.  E, Philadelphia, is fairly obviously an abbreviation, with the first character representing the first sound and the second meaning “city,” like “Phi-town” or something like that.  And D, Buffalo (my favorite), makes no attempt to imitate the English sound: they just took the word for “buffalo” and stuck that “city” character on the end, I guess so you can tell whether they’re talking about the animal or the place.  Which you can’t do in English, except by context.  Maybe the Chinese are on to something.  (Editor’s Note: Uh, capitalization?  It’s not quite dead yet, despite the best efforts of the internet.)

A Fan wasn’t terribly accurate, but we can certainly agree with most of his logic.  He thought B was funky, and really, who doesn’t think “New England” when they hear “funky”?  And Dallas may be the Yankees of football, but C, New York, has two teams that everyone hates: the all-talk-no-championships Jets and the led-by-the-lesser-of-two-Mannings Giants, whom their neighbors in New England will certainly never forgive.  Just as A Fan will never forgive Rex Grossman for failing to win the Super Bowl with the Bears, though Rex actually ended up at G.  The folks in F are crying because Miami is 0-4 and, in a few hours, will be 0-5.

And now I just wonder what a Philly cheesesteak made with buffalo meat would taste like.

But it’s time for a change of pace (“Finally!” they all cry).  We’re going to spend a week watching movies, by which I mean we’re going to spend a week looking at movie titles in a foreign language until our brains hurt.  You may recall that we had a challenge about Academy Award Best Picture winners, and that at that time A Fan suggested we do a quiz about movies that should have won, based on the tried-and-true KYPC method of assuming you know what the quiz is about and the author doesn’t.  So we’re going to give that a try.  All of these are movies that are better than (or at least as good as) the film that took the prize that year.  Don’t worry: these are 100% objective evaluations, with which no sane person could disagree.  The range is 1990-present.  And apologies to Theoman, but we’re still working in the medium of Chinese here.

NOTE: Consulting Wikipedia is both allowed and encouraged for this week’s challenge.  Just make sure your mouse doesn’t stray over to the link to the Chinese article.

A. 低俗小说 B. 冰血暴 C. 鐵面特警隊 D. 少女孕記 E. 天外奇蹟