The phrase four-letter word refers to a set of English words written with four letters which are considered profane, including common popular or slang terms for excretory functions, sexual activity, and genitalia. The "four-letter" claim refers to the fact that most English swear words are monosyllabic, and therefore are likely to have four letters on average. This euphemism came into use during the first half of the twentieth century.
From wikipedia.
Sputnik Sweetheart is the 5th book I have read from Haruki Murakami, the renowned Japanese author. I’ve read “Norwegian Wood” and “The Windup Bird Chronicles” in Turkish and “South of the Border, West of the Sun”, “Underground” and “Sputnik Sweetheart” in English and in that order. I think I’ve become pretty accustomed to his style. The first thing that comes to my mind about the book is that I learned Sputnik means “travel companion” in Russian. I am surprised I did not know this since I am generally interested in this kind of information. It turns out a simple wikipedia search would have done it ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik ). Maybe I read it before, but it didn’t strike me as in this love novel. Here’s the part that makes Sputnik more interesting :) :
<blockquote>And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own seperate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they’re nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we’d be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.
From Page 117.</blockquote>
This excerpt also shows the two characteristics of Murakami-san that I really like. The first is his powerful metaphores, you are directly absorbed into these. Here’s another excerpt:
<blockquote>Who can really distinguish between the sea and what’s reflected in it?
Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?</blockquote>
The other thing apparent from the Sputnik passage in my opinion is the main focus of most Murakami novels: Unrequited love. Unrequited love is the main topic of this novel and it is important in others. This is a very intense love, paralyzing the characters. Their life changes as a result. In nearly all novels of his I’ve read so far, there’s some kind of unrequited love playing an important part in the course of events.
Murakami-san makes heavy use mystical motifs as well. One obvious example is “The Windup Bird Chronicle” where the reader constantly witnesses mystical events happening. Sputnik Sweetheart is no different on this subject. Mysticism and reality gets so crossed over you get confused many times.
All in all, the book unravels the events smoothly as ever, just what you’d expect from a Murakami. Easy to read, high on the enjoyment. I sincerely recommend it to every avid bookworm.
By the time execution reaches inside of a constructor (just passing the opening brace), all the class data members have already been constructed. This is the reason you have to initialize any const or reference data members of a class in the initializer lists. Both const and reference data variables cannot be changed once created, so they will have to be created correctly in the first place. The way to do that is calling the appropriate constructors they have inside initialization lists.
One other side effect of initialization lists is that initializing class data members inside a ctor and not inside initialization list will almost always be less efficient. This is true if you are planning to change the state of the data member right after creating them. Inside the constructor you would already have a complete data member and would change its state using operator=() rather than creating it correctly in initialization list in the first place.
They say love is in the details, that it's the little things that make a person special, but then why are the love songs so alike? It's your smile, it's your eyes, I love your eyes and your smile. I like to go to the beach with you, but really the beach is so interesting and pretty that you could take anyone to the beach.
From the novel Adverbs by Daniel Handler. Harper Perennial, 2006.
If on Linux you are using PulseAudio (so that you can have many goodies such as multiple channels etc.) but your flash videos played by firefox are without sound, check out the fix given here.
Seems that there’s a package that needs to be installed for this to work. Kudos to the one with the solution.
