It’s basically a chain letter or tagging meme, in the form of an award.

I was curious as to where the meme actually came from, and did some digging. I didn’t find much of anything conclusive, but I did find some interesting things:

• “Premio Dardo” means “Dart Award” in Spanish, which fits with the “I Entrega de Premios Dardo 2008″ text. (This means that “Premio Dardo Award” is kind of like “La Brea Tar Pits” in that it literally means “Dart Award Award.”)
• The oldest post I could find in English was October 29, 2008
• Looking up the Spanish phrase from the image, I was able to trace it as far back as February 2008 on Spanish-language blogs.
• There are at least two versions of the image: One large, with text in the empty space at the lower left. The other small, with a black border and text in the border like the much-parodied motivational posters, and labeled as “Premio Dardos.”
• There are at least two different descriptions of the award in English:
  

  This award acknowledges the values that every blogger shows in his or her effort to transmit cultural, ethical, literary, and personal values every day.

  and

  The PREMIO DARDO is designed to recognize unique voices and visions on the Web as well as to promote fraternization amongst bloggers of all sorts.

• The number of blogs you’re expected to pass along the award to is variously given as 5, 10, 12, and 15.
• Blogspot’s search doesn’t seem to work.

The text on the oldest version I could find reads:

La I Entrega de Premios Dardo 2008 se abre paso entre un gran elenco de Premios de reconocido prestigio en el mundo de la literatura, y con el reconoce los valores que cada blogger muestra cada día en su empeño por transmitir valores culturales, éticos, literarios, personal, etc.., que en suma, demuestra su creatividad a través su pensamiento vivo que está y permanece, innato entre sus letras, entre sus palabras rotas”. El premio debe acoger en su interior a un mínimo de 15 bloggers

Roughly translated:

The Dart Awards Ceremony I 2008 appears among a large list of prestigious awards in the world of literature, and recognizes the values that each blogger shows each day in their efforts to convey cultural ethical, literary, personal, etc. values… in short, it demonstrates his creativity through his vibrant thoughts, which remain innate within the letters, torn between his words. ” The prize must encompass at least 15 bloggers

I surmise that:

• Somewhere late last year, the meme jumped from Spanish to English, with only a partial translation of the description.
• Somewhere along the line, the description fell off, and someone wrote a new one.
• Many recipients found it hard to choose 15 blogs, and shortened the list. The shorter number got passed along.

I do have to wonder about the branching factor.  Each recipient passes the meme along to 5–15 new recipients, which means that if they react quickly, the number of Premio Dardo recipients will increase dramatically (think Tribbles).  If it started out more than a year ago, it’s had plenty of time to overrun the blogosphere.  I can only assume that a significant fraction of people who receive it just ignore it, producing dead ends on its path.

Or maybe there are just a lot more blogs out there than I think there are.

Got tech support question in Spanish for wrong company. Replied in bad Spanish with link. Checked against Google Translate. Google has a better vocabulary than I do. #

Links of the day:

• Not good: even with data disabled while roaming, the G1 still hits the internet. #
• All right! A new Vertical Horizon album next spring! #
• Roger Ebert dismantles Expelled (via @mikesterling). #

First, Teen Titans #27, first half of a two parter by fill-in team of Gail Simone and Rob Liefeld. I’d planned on writing a more thorough review, but Comics Should Be Good beat me to it. And yeah, reviewing Liefeld’s art feels like a cheap shot, but sometimes ya just gotta go for it. Simone’s story isn’t bad, but it’s hard to follow. In particular, there are too many places where the art isn’t about story or action, it’s about showing the heroes or villains in dramatic poses. And yeah, you want the occasional dramatic pose, because you want to show off the costumes. That’s part of the genre. But you need to convey what’s actually happening. As dramatic as the last two pages were, I couldn’t figure out just what Kestrel was doing without looking at the “Next issue” blurb!

And then there are the places Liefeld left out dramatic poses that should have been there. The issue introduces a quartet of teen villains, but only one of them gets a full-body dramatic view, two get only action shots, and one—well, let me put it this way. I had to flip back to the beginning to be sure that there really were four of them and not just three. He’s in two panels with only his head and shoulders visible in the entire book. He’s not named, there’s no sign of powers or special skills, and he’s wearing a shirt and tie. I have to wonder whether Liefeld just didn’t get around to designing a costume since the character gets eliminated halfway through the book.

Anyway, onto The Nightmare Before Christmas. I’m a big fan of the movie, which may have been part of my problem reading this, but it seemed to me that the manga was more interested in drawing still images from the movie than, again, telling the story. Don’t get me wrong—it looks great—but it doesn’t read well. Jack’s transformative experience in Christmas Town, for instance, feels rushed and vague. Moments like the guy who takes off his hat to reveal miniature version of himself, who takes off his hat to reveal yet another, etc. are present, but make no impact.

To make matters worse, whoever handled the English translation seems to have done a rush job. They seem to have used the movie script for most of the dialogue, which is actually a good idea, since the Japanese text was likely translated from the movie. But the dialogue used in place of the songs is just… well… lame. They didn’t even bother to translate the sound effects. All in all, a disappointing adaptation.

Usually I just toss them, but every once in a while I try to puzzle them out (especially since I took some Spanish classes a few years ago – the languages are just similar enough I can usually catch the gist). This one was interesting:

Novidade na pesquisa dos discos voadores no Brasil

Visite o site da Revista UFO e conheça o movimento nacional que os ufólogos estão promovendo desde abril para pedir o reconhecimento oficial da Ufologia. Trata-se da campanha UFOs: LIBERDADE DE INFORMAÇÕES JÁ, que já conta com um abaixo-assinado popular com mais de 3 mil assinaturas. Todas as pessoas interessadas no assunto podem participar do movimento e assinar a petição, que será entregue às autoridades federais com um pedido de abertura de seus arquivos secretos contendo registros de observações de UFOs em nosso Território.

It’s about an online UFO magazine, and an effort to petition the Brazilian government to release classified information about UFO sightings and close encounters in Brazil. I got about this far before I decided to try Google’s translation service, and I’ll try to provide a tidied up version:

New in flying saucer research in Brazil [Google translated "discos voadores" as "flying records," which conjured up interesting images.]

Visit the site of UFO Magazine and learn about the national movement ufologists have been promoting since April to ask for official recognition of ufology. About the UFO campaign “Freedom of Information Now,” that already counts more than three thousand signatures. All people interested in the subject can participate in the movement and sign the petition that will be delivered to the federal authorities with a demand to open its classified records [Google suggested "private archives"] on UFOs in our territory.

It then goes on for another paragraph about the magazine’s history, and talks about “UFO sightings in our airspace and direct contact between humans and extraerrestrial civilizations that have visisted us” (I’m pretty sure that’s what it says, anyway).

Amazingly, the message footer contains the line “Essa mensagem não é spam.” — literally, “This message is not spam.” It seems that some aspects of spam are universal.

I mean, seriously, how do you take “Brazilian UFO enthusiasts” as your criteria and come up with an English-speaking California native whose website deals with comic books, creative writing, photography, and Linux? No, they just got my address off of the same list that’s been passed around Brazil for the past seven years.