This week's Metropolis personals A for Effort Award goes to

2006-08-04

This week's Metropolis personals A for Effort Award goes to

Nice to meet you. 白人の男２７さい。失指、元気、ともみかはらみたいな女す気です。野心があるの女性好きです。mailとしゃしのねがいします。 [Address redacted]

(Sic! throughout, explanatory link mine.) I think 失指 is an attempt at 紳士 (gentleman), but unfortunately (a) 失指 isn't a Japanese word (AFAIK?), and (b) if it were, it would mean "fingerless."

I don't know how often I'll be doing this, so I'd better get it all out now.

Aldo Kelrast Award for Creepy Phrasing: "If no-one cares about you, e-mail me."
I Love the 80s Award: "[S]eeking [...] race queen or model type."
Will Smith Award for Keeping it Real: "I'm seeking a JF who's real. I wear long sleeves in the summer and I am real."
Ayn Rand Memorial Award: "Always admire men with power and wealth. Prefer white American."
Faulkner Award for Heartrending Specificity: "Summer is coming. I do not want to spend it alone looking at a can of beans."

Honorable mention goes to the woman who spent her entire ad talking about how much she loves English guys, then finished with an e-mail address along the lines of "take_me_to_france@hotmail.com" (I don't want to publish the real one, obviously.)

Popularity factor: 7

Zusty:

I wear long sleeves in summertime! Does that make me real, or is it merely a coincidence that the two are linked?
I want to send the can of beans guy a greeting card or something. Man. Poor guy.

Denske:

I can only imagine the people who would answer Ayn Rand lady:
"Hi, I'm a rich and powerful white American interested in dating someone who wants an unequal relationship and doesn't mind an impotent partner."

GaijinBiker:

Is this from Metropolis, or is there another thing called Metropolitan?

Matt:

The can of beans person was actually a girl... well, self-identified as one, at least.

Denske: I think that about sums it up. But 十人十色

GB: D'oh! You are correct. Headline fixed.

max:

This is also interesting from an angle of how input methods can go wrong. What did the gentleman type to generate 失指, if it's not a word?

Interesting also that he got snagged by "n-liaison," a final ん getting prefixed onto an initial お. I wonder if this will ever become standard. It also leads me to wonder how many Japanese people use a JIS layout versus a Romanized input method.

Mark S.:

These remind me a lot of some of my first published poems, which I derived from ads in the personals by applying aleatory methods after the style of John Cage and Jackson Mac Low. Damn spammers, though, have taken all the fun out of random texts.

Matt:

Max: Yeah, henkan was obviously a problem for that guy. Re the "no finger" thing, my best guess is that he accidentally typed "shisshi" and henkan'd it from there. 失 would come from the "shitsu" and 指 from the "shi".

2006-08-04