Jesse Mullan

Finally! Something I can tattoo on my ass!

Written on Friday, the 29^th of August, 2003 at 1:55 am and was filed under: Food, Speaking in Tongues

If you have ever struggled with a menu in a Chinese restaurant, take a gander at this site:

http://www.inu.org/meiwah/

It's the joint. Bonus points for you if you can send me the unicode entities for “potsticker”. Oh yes, you will be mine.

Update: thanks to http://www.tigernt.com/, I got my characters. They don't look anything like the drawings. Dammit!

锅贴 [guo1 tie1] /fried dumpling/

锅 [guo1] /pot/pan/boiler/

贴 [tie1] /to stick/to paste/to keep close to/to fit snugly/allowance/

Also, “gold” (金) is supposed to be a part of the “pot” (锅) character. I'm not sure that I see it, but maybe.

Another update- my friend beckett came up with this alternate pair of characters:

鍋贴 [guo1 tie1] /fried dumpling/

Then, because we were arguing over which character was correct, I found this on an online menu:

http://www.222.to/shanghaitown/menu.asp

鍋貼 [guo1 tie1] /fried dumpling/

The last one looks closest to what was on the site where I started, but doesn't match the online dictionaries.

As far as guo (鍋) goes, I found a kanji reference to it, which is Japanese, but the Japanese used Chinese characters as a starting point, so I think that we're on the right path.

http://www.kanjidict.com/demo/934b.html

Ah ha! I spoke with a coworker from Taiwan, and she explained that all four characters are correct, and that one set was Traditional and the other was Simplified.

Traditional: 鍋貼

Simplified: 锅贴

Here's some explanation as to the difference:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese

Of course, all of those characters are displayable via Unicode. I use html entities like 鍋 and 貼 to display the characters that I want. I could code my page in UTF-8. Then, I could just cut and paste the characters instead of translating them into numeric codes. However, my work computer doesn't have Chinese locales installed, so I don't have the fonts to show those characters. They just show up as boxes. My home computer shows everything correctly, which is way cool.

Oh yeah - Beckett wins the prize: a homecooked dinner whenever he is in Minnesota or I am in Los Angeles.

Next up: steamed or fried dumplings? Obviously, I am a fan of the fried variety, but Beckett holds the incorrect opinion that steamed dumplings are somehow better. What ever.

One Response to “Finally! Something I can tattoo on my ass! ”

1. 
   Beckett said on September 3rd, 2003 at 5:47 pm

   I might need to order some steamed pork dumplings right now… just from reading this!