Tiger of the Month Club: September

Sure, there's more centerpiece here than table.

But when you can gaze on these beauties, who needs mere surface?

Frate Indovino: September Sage

Gli affari sono affari! - "Business is business!"

No further comment needed there...

So instead: this month we look at the Frate's fine print.

The calendar is crammed full of miscellaneous items—in assorted fonts that don't scan legibly. So I've only been able to do quick selections for typing into the translator.

I hadn't looked closely at the monthly list of saints and saints-in-waiting [the latter are names preceded by "B." for "Beato"—beatified]. I just assumed the line of text below each name must explain the religious meaning of that day.

But this section is actually where the almanac-style material is placed, on one line per date.

There are weather forecasts:

Settembre 1 Ultimo Quarto... Prime piogge abbondanti mitgano la tempuratura estiva.
September 1 Last quarter... the first heavy rains moderate the summer temperatures

Rhyming proverbs with religious morals:

A chi crede - Dio provvede
To those who believe - God provides

Beato chi vede con l'occhio della Fede
Blessed are those who see with the eye of faith

And general philosophizing, mostly expressed in rhyme:

Chi spreca ogni risorsa - non termina la corsa
Who squandered every resource - does not finish the race

There are proverbs that seem equivalent to some in English:

Dove sta la rana - l'acqua non è lontano
Where is the frog - water is not far
["Where there's smoke there's fire"]

Non dire mai "gatto!" - se non l'hai nel sacco
Never say "cat" - if you have not in the bag
["Don’t count your chickens..."; but with disturbing imagery]

Like the messages inside chocolate baci wrappers, there are lovely-sounding Italian rhymes that fall flat in English:

Amor perso in un momento - non si riacquista in anni cento
Love lost in a moment – will not return in one hundred years

Quando soffia Madam Fortuna- i granelli fan presto una duna
When it blows Madam Fortuna soon fans grains into a dune

Awkward translation grammar isn't too hard to clean up, but idioms that stump the translator have me stumped, too:

Di ogni altro amore è perno - il sincero amor materno
Each pin is another love - the true maternal love

Non c'è mucca così netta - che non abbia una macchietta
There is no clear-cut cow - which has not a speck

There are even weather and agricultural reports in rhyme:

Se piove il quattro di Settembre - si sta a bagno fino a Dicembre
If it rains on the 4th of September - it will soak until December

Settembre amico - apre mandorla e fico
September friend - opens [start of harvesting?] almond and fig

And, were truer words ever written?

Bolli, scartoffie e fogli - il mondo è pieno d'imbrogli
Stamps, paperwork and spreadsheets - the world is full of tricks

And in a world full of managers like the guy in the sheepskin: one can only try to look absorbed in the spreadsheets, while praying the boss takes note and walks on by...

Marine Products

Found on a shelf in a Chinese supermarket—
This is on glossy paper, 6 x 10 1/2 inches. It may have been packed in a shipping carton, then put aside and forgotten as shelves were stocked.

The gaudy colors—and the humanoid fish—remind me of this Max Fleisher underwater world...

Tiger of the Month Club: August

Of all the months, this credibility failure is my favorite:

Frate Indovino: August Augur

"Traffic Report"

Cartoon based on the proverb of the month, "Who goes slowly goes safely and far."

A discussion follows, with additional proverbs/thoughts on safety and traffic.

Of course, these expressions usually don't translate well—even more so when they are just plugged into a program.

But, tortured syntax and all, this seems to contain plenty of good sense:

Today, thanks to the miracles of progress, can also change the proverbs. And then there are those who think it is useless to continue to lower speed limits, especially for those who want to bust, 50 or 100 does the same. And then the proverb says: "Never did good dog chain." Has anyone else tried to make us even on irony: "If we think about it, the more you stay on the road, the greater the chances of accidents: prudence therefore advised to go at full speed." (Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca). The reasoning seems to spin, but when we open the newspaper or turn on the TV, always jumps out of the usual news: "A long row, close the street, made a pass and so be it!" In life you can correct many errors, but in traffic, no, "It is true that those who arrive late ... bad park," but it is equally true that "we must not disturb the misfortunes when they sleep." Psychologists say that to protect the shell of your car, even the timid become lions, but what's the point then, if you just fall back rabbits? In conclusion, my advice is to drive carefully in mind cleared, and moderate speed, without competition of strength or cunning, and above all respect the traffic lights (keep an eye on the yellow ... traitor), because in crazy and chaotic bustle of life today, were the only instruments capable of us together.

The "Favorable Days" prediction sounds pretty much like Italian traffic:

unfavorable critical months that cause psychological distress in addition to possible geophysical consequences.

Social History Through T-shirts

Make that: teii shatsu. To be exact, Japanese shirts from the mid-1980s: the era of puffy youth fashion.

While my French is pretty basic, and word division aside, this seems perfectly fine. For that matter, when I've seen French used on Japanese objects, it has read like it was lifted from printed matter.

Then, as now, the usual practice for product decoration was to go with some version of English. If the French came from printed sources, the English equivalent was not exactly Shakespeare.

Meaningless scrawl, or "Repo"? As in, "Repo Man"? The movie is from 1984, so the timing works for me to have bought this 1985 or so.

At some point in those years I was told there had been a notorious drug bust of stationery designers. Tripping would go a long way toward explaining how they came up with wacky English for embellishing kids' pencil cases. Whether the story was truth or joke, it's brought to mind by this T-shirt verse. Which, for once, is admirably grammatical.

A puffy girl...

While Econo Size is impressive, it's hard to accept that she could heft it with only one tiny hand. Tiny because it's so out of scale, or to accentuate the chic puffiness of her outfit?

Some of the most unavoidable pop music of the mid-'80s was by a boy band whose members wore oversized, wiiiiide jackets. If I ever knew the band's name, it's long forgotten. As huge as Japanese pop culture is now, most stuff from my time in the country can't be found, at least not in English. Unfortunately, it was just a few years too pre-Internet.

My surviving mid-'80s T-shirts at least document the puffy fashion of the era.

Like so many other shirts, the collar of this one offers a bonus.

While it's doubtful that Japanese youth ever actually read the messages, this shirt did have good intentions. Too bad the execution didn't live up to them.

Midsummer Greetings

Handmade post cards: wood veneer, ink painting, calligraphy, and paper [moon].

These were found in Los Angeles in the late 1980s, in a Little Tokyo gift shop run by two elderly women. There was a good bit of stock that appeared to be from the late '50s and early '60s, and I suspect these cards are about that old.

The cards mark ochūgen (お中元), which is secondary to New Year as a time of gift-giving and sending post cards with best wishes.

In Japan in the mid-80s, I bought quite a few ochūgen cards of summer flowers, dragonflies, and other seasonal themes, which were mass-produced and available at any stationery shop. At a folk art shop I also found a number of designs stenciled on handmade card, with the maker's name and a "post card" ID stamped on the reverse.

The cards above are unusual in being blank on the reverse, without even the craft person's name. They don't seem likely to have come from Japan; perhaps they were hobby work by a local person.