Victory Manual

What’s up with this Engrish I found in the dictionary?
I was checking out a few example uses for かつて, and these grammatically horrid examples popped up:
彼女のかつての友達 = her sometime friend.
What’s a “sometime friend”? I’d have translated it as, “Her on-and-off friend.” At least it’s something you might actually hear being used.
Then there was,
かつての友 [...]

年輪。全てを支配したいサウロンを抵抗するため、年輪のいっぱいエント（木人間）がホビットを手伝った！
多数決。多数決原理がないと、民主主義は無理。
夜明け。夜明け明けましておめでとう。
要点。議院の議員は自分の声があまりにも好きで、長いスピーチが終了しても、最後に要点に触れなかった！(Probably grammatically dubious)
演ずる。1万円をもらうため、演ずる。
演ずる alternate version featuring 親父ギャグ: 演ずる to make えんず meet.
貴族。寂しい貴族は帰属意識がない。かわいいそう。
途端。彼は失業して、塗炭の苦しみを感じた途端に宝くじがあたった！（よかったね）
かつて。かつてかつおを勝手に食った。
からかう。どうして新しい服を買うって、友達が僕のスタイルをからかうから買う。
雇う。野党が夜盗を雇う。（これは全然正当の宣伝ではないよ！ただの記憶術だ。）

As a foreigner in Japan who currently teaches English, it’s impossible to avoid having an opinion on a policy of mandatory second-language education. Deas from rockinginhakata.com commented on bilingualism (particularly of English and Spanish in the States), but I want to take one step back, towards second-language education in a general scope.
In terms of [...]

幹事の漢字はなかなかいい感じ
The executive secretary’s kanji are pretty decent.
-or-
The kanji for ‘executive secretary’ are pretty decent.

Update: This one works,
両親の教えは良心を形成する。
———————
よく育つと、両親は良心になるものだ。
Does that work grammatically?
両親が良心になることは、よく育ってから。
両親の心が良心になることだ。
Which one of these works best as a mnemonic device? Is there a better way to arrange the information?

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 [...]

This is just a memory device that popped into my head while studying うちに:
A君：忘れないうちに言っておきたいことがある。
B君：はい。どうぞ。
A君：なんだったっけ…
Translation
A: There’s something I want to tell you before I forget.
B: Yeah, sure. Go ahead.
A: What was it again?
さすがA君！

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 [...]

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 [...]

I continue to realize the existence of problems in English the more I study Japanese.
Of course, I’m sure everyone already knows the problem with the sentence, “The boy watched the girl looking through the telescope.” Was the boy using a telescope to watch the girl? Or was the boy watching a girl who [...]