CAPSTAN

The Clutter Monster reared its ugly head again in my world. My brother's iBook no longer shows the screen. It has a video out port but for the life of me I cannot find the adapter. The adapters I have are for PowerBooks. I would like to hook the iBook to an external monitor and see if it works that way. Strangely, I can connect to the hard drive via FireWire and target mode, but displaying his home folder always ends in a freezing of Finder.

While I couldn't find the iBook adapter, I did come across something that I totally had zero recollection of. It's sort of an acrostic poem that spells the word CAPSTAN, which perhaps some old Vietnamese person out there would recognize as a popular cigarette brand. For whatever reason, I always have the following one-liner in my head:

Con Anh Phá Sản Tại Anh Ngu

It translates to Your Son Ruins Your Fortune Because You Are Stupid. From time to time, I blame myself for pampering my son too much, perhaps that's why the phrase sticks. There is another poem that spells CAPSTAN in each line, either forward and backward. I came across it in a tiny notebook I had during my stay in the Indonesian refugee camp. It was some farewell book my eldest sister didn't need at the time, or maybe she thought I could make better use of it. My Chinese is pretty spotty but I can understand that most of the pages mentioned Best Wishes and such. Anyway, here's the acrostic poem that I find interesting:

Chiếc Áo Phong Sương Tình Ân Nghĩa
Nghĩa Ân Tình Sao Phụ Anh Chi
Cho Anh Phát Súng Tim Anh Nát
Còn Ai Phải Si Tình Anh Nữa

Too many words to translate into English. You are on your own, for now.