"He's a god, you fool. It'll take more than one shot."

[larryhammer]

It is annoying, to say the least, to pick up a couple pieces of pernicious malware less than a week after getting your computer back with a new hard-drive. I was not even finished installing and configuring all Seven Important Applications and Eight Useful Utilities, when Firefox began spawning random pop-ups and explorer.exe became unable to close gracefully. It is most distressing, as is proved by the following verse:

Beneath the winter clouds, my heart is heavy
For my infected laptop's running slow:
While AdAware detects, it can't repair,
And Spybot finds but can't unblock the flow.
Smitfraud has coded claws that still hold on,
While Virtumonde's bit teeth will not let go.
May Heaven's Emperor damn their creators
To be some demon's entertaining show!

To take my mind off such woes, I've turned from Song dynasty poetry to a Ming dynasty novel: Journey to the West in a pretty good complete translation -- 100 chapters of oriental picaresque harnessed to the cart of Buddhist propaganda. Much more entertaining than Outlaws of the Marsh, being an abridgment of Water Margin. The Monkey King is, of course, my favorite character. Marvelous monkey! I especially like how the Taoist powers of the Confucian gods are not enough to overcome his tantrum and they have to call in Buddha -- not just any Buddha, but the Buddha -- to send that boy into time-out for several centuries under a mountain. The episode rings enough of a bell, actually, that I'm pretty sure the fragmentary memory from Japan about a dog/fox/monkey boy in a giant's hand was, in fact, an anime of this scene. Seems quite possible, given the popularity of the story and how the writing on Buddha's finger sounds really familiar. Either way, it spooked the heck out of me at the time.

In any case, between my labors I, like a dutiful scholar, humbly continue collecting links full of the Four Edifications and Five Enjoyments for you all. And if you don't know what links I have, you must listen to them in the next installment.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Ahh, Minnie Driver--a very good voice for Lady Eboshi, and all her lines in English were quite, quite good.

(I love that movie and have the dialogue practically memorized, so recognized your subject line right away).

I am very sorry about your computer but love your poem very much. Quite excellent.

Dare I say you need a Mac? No, actually, I dare not: if I say anything so full of hubris, who knows what will happen to this machine?

[larryhammer]

I love the line in the English dub, though it's not exactly what the original was saying.

What I kinda want instead of a Mac is to move to Linux, but that would require purchasing a different version of FrameMaker.

---L.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_twilight_/]

I (heart) The Monkey King character. I have a translation of that section of JttW, and it is one of my desert island books.

[larryhammer]

This is a box set of four continuously numbered (2400 pages!) volumes -- I wonder if I get to count that as a single book for desert island purposes?

---L.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_twilight_/]

Sure. It's a big enough hypothetical island that even the OED could count as one book. ;)

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

My sympathies. I hope you are able to find antivirals and other such computer medications that will deal with the problem. I run NoScript on Firefox, which helps (and would help more if I weren't constantly telling it to allow this or that, so I can watch all the media people post.

It's cool that you can take such an event and get poetry out of it. Poet Larry for the Win! :)