bonjour matte, comment allez-vous?

I've been visited from a broad again. I mean I had another foreign visitor!

But of course that means I need to be able to read foreign languages, which I can't. So luckily there's the Babel Fish translation service over at Alta Vista.

First, I translated the phrase to German, because I did take a little bit of German in college (to pass a requirement, of course). That returned Rohsteinguten Tag wie gehen Sie?

That of course could have been Greek for all I could understand it. I think I remember "tag" is day. I think "tag wie gehen sie" is "what day is it?"

It's Tuesday. Whew! That was easy.

But wait! What's the "Rohsteinguten?" Who knows. I certainly didn't. So I used the trusty Babel Fish again and translated the German to English. This returned: You go to good day as?

Ah, English! What a relief. Much easier to read.

But wait! You go to good day as? I tend to go to the good days as a monkey wearing hip-hugging rubber bootpants. You? I go to the bad days dressed as a beach bum named Willy.

It's so refreshing to know we now have the tools to be able to communicate across political boundaries. No longer will language be a barrier.

And to think that the original phrase looked like it had something to do with me. I thought that was my name, but no, it was just the French for Rohsteinguten. See, I bet you thought I didn't retain what I learned, just water.