July 10, 2008
I just discovered this as I sailed the high [internet] seas:
Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath.
This made him. …
A super-calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitos.
…
Because I was afraid to speak when I was just a lad, me father gave me nose a tweak and told me I was bad, but then one day I learned a word to save me aching nose. The biggest word you’ve ever heard, and this is how it goes: A super-calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitos.
UPDATE:
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is taking over my mind!
Soup or cauliflower, just stick XP out of dough, sheesh!
Sue per callous, fragile instincts; ex pays all the do’, sheesh!
Sue put out a flag; enlist an expert that is dopish.
July 7, 2008
So I looked at the entrance requirements to a graduate school like Princeton (I’m not planning to apply for graduate school at Princeton, I was just curious about the process) and for East Asian Studies the pre-reqs are to be proficient in two foreign languages, meaning two languages besides your native tongue. They recommend the language of the Asian region you are focusing on (Japanese, check.) and one European language (…). I assume these reqs exist so that you have a wider variety of source materials to research from.
Again, I’m not at all considering applying for graduate school at Princeton, but I took their requirements as a challenge. I won’t let them beat me! So I’ve decided to study Spanish. That links to my humble journal which records my daily efforts. Today is day three!
Me encanta estudiar español. Especially after studying Japanese. I’m shooting for high-proficiency within a year at most, ideally 6 months.
July 7, 2008
This is a thought that just occured to me, but it seems that an increase in crime has a direct correlation with materialism in society. People want stuff, and to get stuff you need cash.
With an increasingly short attention span, thanks to the influence of things like music videos where any given scene is less than 4 seconds long, most being merely 2 seconds and acting as a sort of strobe effect that bombards your senses, people have no patience anymore. Consider the people of modern society as a sort of collective Veruca Salt - Needy, greedy, and inconsiderate - and old society as Charlie - Just getting by.
There were, of course, problems in old society, too, but not to the extent that murder for possessions was commonplace. By old society I don’t mean “ancient society”, but a nearer time when human culture had gone through considerable progression, which contrasts modern society in which I feel many elements have actually gone through regression. I wonder when we’ll be presented with a reality TV version of gladiator events? Or isn’t that K-1?
There were always crimes. Crimes of passion. Crimes of hate. Crimes of jealousy. Perhaps that’s what we’re seeing a lot of now - Crimes of jealousy. Anymore, it’s not that we’re simply keeping up with the Joneses, but we’re murdering them so we can take what the Joneses have. It’s really strange, too, because it’s not even about survival - It’s about luxury, and it has become a mainstream mentality.
July 3, 2008
Curiosity lead me to hunt down some numbers for my personal interest in mining statistics.
Considering a liberal estimate of 14 million Jews world-wide, and a world population of 6,707,035,007 as of July 1st, 2008, that means the world is only .2% Jewish. Out of the 574 Nobel Prize Laureates, 160 are Jews, meaning that 27.8% of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish. That impressed me.
In Japan, there are approximately 1,000 Jews (according to one uncited source…) out of a population of 125,433,494, which is a mere 0.000008%. That sounds a bit low to me, considering there are 600,000 Koreans, 600,000 Chinese, and 52,000 Americans. But considering the U.S. is 1.6% Jewish, there should be approx. 832 Jews from the States in Japan, if the statistics hold true across the board. I couldn’t say how many Jewish citizens of Israel move to Japan.
Jews may have arrived in Japan as early as the Yamato period (c. 250 - 710). This could be likely, as Jews are also historically documented as having been in China, as well.
I haven’t had a chance to go through them yet myself, but there is a list of interesting titles in the external links section of Wikipedia around the Jewish image in the Japanese mind. Check them out if you’re interested in further reading.
July 3, 2008
Let’s look at a few phrases that are useful when you want to get pissed in Japanese. (Here, I mean the American-English ‘pissed’ as in ‘angry’, not the British-English ‘drunk’, although it would be an interesting thing to see someone actually getting drunk on Japanese.)
よくそんなばかなことをしたもんだ！
How could you be such an idiot!
When your friend, in a drunken stupor, accidentally sells himself to a brothel aimed at middle-aged female clientele, “よくそんなばかなことをしたもんだ！”
黙りやがれ！
Shut the $!@# up!
When your friend keeps going on and on about how much of an idiot you are for selling yourself to a brothel aimed at middle-aged female clientele, “黙りやがれ！”
勝手にしろ！
To hell with you!
This is very useful when you’ve given up on someone for something they’ve done to make you mad, or if they are just overly しつこい (pertinacious), like when your friend refuses to listen to your complaints about his recent episode where he got drunk and sold himself to a brothel aimed at middle-aged female clientele. “勝手にしろ！”
P.S. - The Victory Manual is 3 years old today! Yay!
July 1, 2008
Let me tell you a little bit about what made Kublai Kahn such an impressive leader, even by our modern standards.
Kublai Kahn united China, in spite of being a foreigner, and despite that his own country was in civil unrest at the time. Furthermore, he was tolerant of the Chinese culture and did not attempt to “Mongolize” the Chinese people, going as far as to model his new capital city after Chinese architecture. His empire was also tolerant of different religions.
Kublai Kahn successfully instituted a diverse global economy that stretched from China, through the Middle East and Russia, up to Eastern Europe’s front porch. (He also implemented a paper currency system, but that didn’t work out so well)
Despite all of the fervent protests in modern Korea over historical Japanese occupation, Koreans were the first ones to attempt invasion at the request of Kublai Kahn. Their failure is solidified in historical records as the great “Kamikaze” event where a typhoon wiped out their entire fleet. (With a little more planning, they would have conquered Japan)
Kublai Kahn had a counsel assembly for advice from qualified individuals, and he actually listened to them.
Kublai Kahn instituted a welfare system that benefitted those negatively affected by his conquest campaigns, and established systems that ensured ample food supply for peasants even in years with low crop yields.
All of this despite that he was from a land of “barbarians”.
June 29, 2008
When someone says “comic book” in English, I’m guessing most people, like me, think of Superman, Spiderman, Batman, X-Men, or some other super-hero (powerful-sounding-word+man) based storyline. The Japanese version of comics (manga) are completely different, though.
I found a compact series called 「マンガ、日本の歴史がわかる本」 (Which is hard to translate as it comes out as something like “Manga: The book [with] which you can understand Japanese History”, so I’ll just make a new English title: Japanese History, the Manga!) that has 3 parts. I started from the beginning with, 「古代～南北朝時代」 (From Ancient Times to the Era of Northern and Southern Dynasties [1392]).
These are definitely not substitutes for actual history books, but they’re good primers that give you the general outline of historical progress and the major players. They’re fun and educational!
