Read this blog in Finnish. Or hrvatsky or ceski.

An Israeli reader of this blog e-mailed me today to tell me that the notice of Cache of Corpses on the Hebrew website discussed here yesterday isn't a critical review but a simple description of the book. Probably it's just a translation of the publisher's promotional copy. (But two stars? Where did that come from?)

Speaking of translations, Google has a Babelfish-like program that translates text between languages.

Or, rather, attempts to -- even the most sophisticated computer program will choke on syntactical and stylish tricks, and when there's no equivalent word in the second language, the translation engine will make a wild guess or just repeat the word used in the first. For instance, the German schadenfreude is translated into English as "damage". Phooey.

Meantime, you can read this blog in Finnish or French or German or Spanish by clicking on the "Google Translator" box at the bottom of the left rail on this page and selecting a language.

It's fun. But likely not terribly accurate.

Any Hebrew-English translators out there?

The other day I discovered that my latest mystery, Cache of Corpses, had been reviewed on a Hebrew web site, shvoong.com.

There doesn't seem to be a Babelfish-style Hebrew-to-English translation engine on the Web. Plenty of human translators abound on the Internet, but the least expensive one I found wants $120 to render 300 words of Hebrew into English. That's a bit dear for me.

So: Can any reader of this blog tell me what the review says, or at least its gist?

Not that it's a rave. A summary line gives the novel only two out of five stars.

Speaking of Internet translation engines, Finnish to English seems to be problematical, too, as this Finnish cultural website suggests.

The subject of that story, the "Mobile Female Monument," is, well, singular. It's doubtful that it would be received enthusiastically in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Beware the asexual agenda

"The swift extinction of asexuals, and the absence of big asexual groups, suggests that sex is essential for long-term evolutionary success: giving up sex is a Bad Idea, a kind of evolutionary suicide."

Barack Obama may be hogging the headlines today, but the best thing in the papers is the latest Op-Ed piece in the New York Times by Olivia Judson, the evolutionary biologist who explains things in her bailiwick to us clueless mopes better than anyone else.

Judson is writing about creatures called bdelloid rotifers (pronounced in the usual way), tiny animals that reproduce without making whoopee. The trouble with this kind of abstinence, she writes, is that there's no supply of new genes to strengthen the organism for the battles of natural selection.

But wait: It has been discovered that the merry bdelloids may have survived for 85 million years because they're sneakily picking up genes from other, wholly unrelated organisms they swim with in puddles.

It's another endlessly engrossing piece by a gifted writer-scientist.

Can religion be ignored in politics?

By the way, speaking of Obama, one obvious conclusion to draw about this cycle's Democratic and Republican primaries is this: Politicians should stay the hell away from preachers, whether they be on the Religious Left or the Religious Right. The easiest way to do that, of course, is not to go to church at all. But that would piss off all too many voters who measure the governing potential of a candidate by his -- or her -- professed commitment to the Lord. Talk about damned if you do and damned if you don't.

How do you pronounce 'sweet revenge'?

"How do you say 'Vladimir Nabokov'?" I once asked a professor of Russian literature, who wrote for my book section at the Chicago Sun-Times. (Deaf people, you know, tend to butcher unfamiliar pronunciations. We need all the help we can get if we are not to appear a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic.)

"Na-BO-koff," she said. "The accent's on the second syllable, just like Rudolf Nu-REY-off. And that's "Vla-DEE-mir, not VLAD-i-mir."

Some time later I was chatting with friends, Wellesley- and Cornell-educated, when the subject of Nabokov's novels came up.

"Na-BO-koff," I said.

They snorted. "It's 'NAB-o-koff,'" they said, patting my head figuratively.

"I understand from a Russian lit expert it's 'Na-BO-koff,'" I said defensively.

"Henry, everyone knows it's 'NAB-o-koff.' Nobody will know who you're talking about."

I was outnumbered, but I know how to carry a smoldering grudge, and there are plenty of them in my mental backpack after six decades of patronization from hearing folks. Now, years later, I have my revenge in black and white from, of all places, a web site for the blind.

It's "Say How: A Pronunciation Guide to Names of Public Figures," a page on the site of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, part of the Library of Congress. (Can't get more authoritative than that, can you?)

And yes, there it is:

"Nabokov, Vladimir (vlä-DĒ-mir nä-BO-kôf)"

Vindication!

(With belated thanks to Shelf Awareness for the tip.)

Fertility clinic pioneer

A common sight in North America but a rare visitor to our backyard feeder is this Brown-headed Cowbird. They invented surrogate parenthood, laying their eggs in the nests of other birds and leaving the foster parents to do the hatching, feeding and rearing. Sometimes it seems that the origins of just about every human medical procedure lie in the wild.

Fast train to oblivion

I am almost sixty-eight years old, and I am a retired print newspaper journalist. If that's not enough to make me look positively Precambrian, a small item I encountered yesterday while looking up something else on the Web has started the nails into my coffin:

The monthly circulation of Model Railroader magazine has dropped from a high of 225,000 copies in 1950 to 162,500 today.

Hardly a surprise. The generation born during and just after World War II was the last to truly enjoy toy trains under the holiday tree. As the decades wore on and new kinds of models -- airplanes, slot cars, rockets among them -- had their heyday and were replaced by Wii and its ilk, the average model railroader grew grayer and grayer. Today train shows and hobby shops (if you still can find them) are haunted primarily by grandfathers.

And this despite the inroads high-tech electronics have made into the hobby. Today many if not most model trains are controlled by tiny wireless receivers implanted into locomotives. Grandpa's not necessarily mired in the Industrial Revolution.

Rivers of ink and forests of paper have been expended in efforts to explain why trains still capture the collective imagination of old men. Some of them are simple attempts to recapture the childlike joy of discovering the latest Lionel boxcar on Christmas Day, of playing trains with Dad. Another is the satisfaction of constructing and operating one's own model empire with the greatest possible realism and complexity.

Four years ago a charming book was published that vividly explained why model trains have had such an impact on the inner lives of Baby Boomers: Playing with Trains: A Passion Beyond Scale by Sam Posey, the former Grand Prix auto racer and Emmy-winning sportscaster. It's still selling modestly well on Amazon.com, checking in at a respectable No. 203,830 this morning, and it's one of 125,000 titles available in a Kindle version.

Whether it's a poem to a durable passion or a paean for a disappearing pastime I don't know, but if you ever wanted to understand why your grandfather is so nuts about a hobby with a history as ancient as that of whist, this book is the place to start.

It has been years since I last seriously played with trains, most recently having built a small N scale layout inside a cocktail table with a lift-off top. I still have the locomotives and cars, however, and now and then haul them out to recapture old dreams. Other hobbies have taken up my leisure time over the years -- tropical fish, furniture building and photography among them -- but always I seem to return to first principles, those that begin with flanged wheel on steel rail.

Can't you hear the lonesome whistle in the night, too?

Stuffing his face

The Eastern Chipmunk is so ubiqitous as to be unremarkable, but yesterday I saw one for the first time this year. Three times he packed his cheek pouches with tidbits dropped from the bird feeder by sparrows, perhaps the only sloppier eaters than the 18-month-old human child. Three times he scampered to his midden under the bridalwreath bush and dumped his load to return for more. He's probably the most industrious creature I've yet photographed from the backyard deck.