Hard Frost

This past August, I posted "The woods are lovely, dark and deep," about a sync involving that Robert Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on Snowy Evening." First I had seen in a vocabulary book an example sentence that clearly alluded to that poem. Then the next day my wife got me to watch a documentary with her which was called (in English translation) And Miles to Go Before I Sleep and ended by displaying the final stanza of that poem on the screen in both English and Chinese. I noted how incongruous the use of Frost's poem was. The movie was about "about a Vietnamese illegal alien who was shot nine times by Taiwanese police while he was attempting to steal a cop car while naked and high on drugs," and its themes of violence and cruelty stood in stark contrast to the atmosphere of the Frost poem.

I happened to think of that movie again while I was on the road this morning. The movie's original, Chinese, title can be translated literally as Nine Shots, and this morning I saw that a new billboard had been put up in the city, advertising collagen tablets with the confusing slogan "ONE SHOT, Beauty SHOT."

One Shot naturally made me think of Nine Shots.

In the evening, I was again teaching vocabulary, from a different book. One of the target words was frost, which required some explaining in this subtropical country. Everyone knows what snow is even if they've never seen it in person, but frost was a totally new concept to many of my students. I said you can think of it as essentially "frozen dew" and described how when frost forms on grass, it makes the grass hard and brittle so that it crunches under your feet.

After the class, I poked around on Synlogos a bit and ran across this meme:

The joke is that it turns a peaceful contemplative line into something a hardass would say, just as Nine Shots takes lines from the same poem and inserts them into a violent story where they are comically out of place.