A strange and sometimes violent movie, OldBoy sprinkles dark humor in among the scenes of torture and fist-fights to lighten things up now and again. I couldn’t help but chuckle when a man found three chopsticks on his meal tray and opined (roughly translated):

All I could think now
was that my neighbor next door
ate with one chopstick

The production is Korean, but it’s definitely a Japanese story. Perhaps most interesting, at least from a security perspective, is that the protagonist is suddenly free from solitary confinement after fifteen years but entirely unsure about who or why he was imprisoned in the first place. Like Kafka’s Joseph K, he sets out to figure out what his crime might have been and in the process continuously stumbles into the question of whether to trust anything or anyone.

There’s something funny to me about seeing the name “Davi”. It’s unique enough that I rarely have the luxury of finding my name directed at some other person.

So, imagine my surprise when I was doing some research on poetry and came across a recent childrens’ book called A Boy No More, by Harry Mazer. The protagonist has a Japanese American friend who is named “Davi Mori”. I find it very odd to see the reviewers saying “Davi” this and that.

What does this have to do with security? I suspect many people who have common names use a number of other criteria to determine who is actually the subject of a phrase. Voice recognition, or even intonations, must be a big part as well as context. In a reverse sense, when someone calls me on the phone and can not pronounce my name correctly, I can immediately identify them as a stranger.

Oh, and speaking of strangers, I only just discovered that Davi Walders is a famous poet. It’s not clear how she pronounces her name, though, or if it is an abbreviation/nickname.