A Sofa Story

Am I going to hell for finding this story mildly hysterical?

When the new chocolate-coloured sofa set was delivered to her Brampton home, Doris Moore was stunned to see packing labels describing the shade as "Nigger-brown."

She and husband Douglas purchased a sofa, loveseat and chair in dark brown leather last week from Vanaik Furniture and Mattress store on Dundas St. E.

Moore, 30, who describes herself as an African-American born and raised in New York, said it was her 7-year-old daughter who pointed out the label just after delivery men from the Mississauga furniture store left.

"She's very curious and she started reading the labels," Moore explained. "She said, `Mommy, what is nig ... ger brown?' I went over and just couldn't believe my eyes."

It's a true story folks!

Romesh Vanaik, owner of Vanaik Furniture where Moore bought the sofa, said it has been a best seller. He said he checked his stock but found no other couch with the offensive label.

He added that he had not known the meaning of the N-word.

"It's amazing. I've been here since 1972 and I never knew the meaning of this word," said Vanaik, a native of India.

Ahahahah wtf? Sounds like someone trying to play the naive immigrant card. Some one call this guy out on his BS. C'mon Mr. Brown Proprietor - how do live in this country for 35 years and not know what nigger means?

The story actually gets even more bizarre...

His supplier, Paul Kumar of Cosmos Furniture in Toronto, denied responsibility and refused to give the name of the couch's Chinese manufacturer.

"It's not my fault. It's not the manufacturers' fault," he said, adding that Kingsoft was to blame.

Huang said Kingsoft has worked to correct the translation error. In the 2007 version, typing "dark brown" in Chinese does not produce the racial slur in English. But if the offensive term is typed in English, the Chinese translation is "dark brown," he said.

No, this is not a Mad TV skit! This is not a story from The Onion!

Kingsoft Corp., a Chinese software company, acknowledged its translation program was at fault and said it was a regrettable error.

"I know this is a very bad word," Huang Luoyi, a product manager for the Beijing-based company's translation software, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

He explained that when the Chinese characters for "dark brown" are typed into an older version of its Chinese-English translation software, the offensive N-word description comes up.

"We got the definition from a Chinese-English dictionary. We've been using the dictionary for 10 years. Maybe the dictionary was updated, but we probably didn't follow suit," he said.

Again, where'd they get this Chinese-to-English dictionary!?!? From the David Duke library, copyright 1923? And how many have people have their asses planted right now on a nigger!? (literally) BUT I am willing to give them a pass... Mainland China isn't a bastion of English proficiency.

Eddie and I were joking about this story a couple weeks back, and we talked about this happening in Canada, and how this is such a ho-hum matter that's barely got any press up here, and that this is all a result of not having a prominent race/civil rights lobby akin to the NAACP here, and how had this had happened in the United States, Kumar & Kingsoft and all their cronies would be villified and crucified, and that you could bet that there'd be Jesse Jackson & Al Sharpton right now on Anderson Cooper 360 collectively laying the smack down on this guy's ass. And there'd be boycotts and riots in Harlem and Newark.

Well, wouldn't you know it, that following Monday talk show host Don Imus calls the Rutgers woman's basketball team a bunch of "nappy-headed hos". And who is there to berate Imus? None other than the patron saint of PC-virtue himself, the paragon of goodness, the chief of the moral police, Reverend Al Sharpton. Imus is tarred, feathered and McCarthied by the media and promptly relieved of his duties.

There's a bit of savage irony to this incident. This incident didn't take place in 1950s Jim Crow rural Georgia, where it wouldn't be hard to fathom such a thing happening. No, this happened in 2007, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada! The world's most diverse city, a model for racial harmony - and that is the savage irony of it all: it's a racism story but not your standard white-on-black racism story. Here you have with brown people and Chinese people in the mix as the offending parties, but the racism isn't at all intentional. It's a story that could happen only in a bizarrely post-modern globalized world, but it's a uniquely Canadian story with a distinctly multicultural Toronto twist.

Now Aaron Yam wants to know how he can get this couch?