death to hewlett-packard

i have an HP printer. it's not that old. aside from the sad state of affairs in which printer companies (and they are ALL guilty of this) put less and less ink in the cartridges but charge you more per cartridge and thereby solve the problem of rising expenses (or the need to fill out fatter bonuses for high level management while soaking everyone else) for the last nine or ten months the printer has been doing this cute little passive-agressive machine bullshit where it shuts itself off unexpectedly and will not function again until i disconnect every cord in the power supply and perform a full reset, which is a procedure that takes five or ten minutes, has multiple steps, and usually has to be performed two or three times.

now my printer has advanced to the point where it no longer wished to print anything black. half of the diagnostics said i had a half cartridge of black ink, and half the diagnostics said i was low on at least some ink, and because i had JUST replaced the color cartridges i figured i needed to replace the black.

so i did that (cartridges being so cheap and all) and the response from the printer is to continue to decline to print anything black and also to turn itself off capriciously in the middle of any test, report or cleaning function, to start cleaning functions whenever it feels like, and still not print anything black.

death to hewlett-packard.

which brings me to an amusing thing about international affairs.

did you remember when we as a nation first got so terribly upset at iranian people shouting "death to america"?

it turns out that "death to (insert thing here)" is kind of an iranian idiom.

is your bus late? death to the bus line.
is cabbage too expensive at market? death to cabbages.
are the potatoes overcooked? death to potatoes.

so it only goes to figure that if the US messes with their country, topples their government and installs a dictator who gives the rights to their national resources to US oil companies, the thing they would say is "death to america".

and maybe because of the egregious nature of the wrongs against them they might mean it this time, but it's no use for anybody over here to get all upset at their choice of words.

death to bad translations.