Tongue Twisters Handout
Parallel translations of English and Japanese tongue twisters for your sadistic amusement.
Come and get it! (Download from this link.)
Useless At Present
Hello all.
The title of this post is the actual living experience I am in the midst of this week/end. I feel useless. Why? Because I went and got sick, and it was bad. To quote a study buddy from college, it was Bad News Bears. So, yeah. I am sitting here typing into this text field instead of eating haggis and dancing with a ton of extremely cool Scottish (and wannabe Scottish) folks in Imabari. That’s right, I am missing the event of the year, Burns Night a la Aileen and Chris, because I am sick. Alas, the complete and total lack of a VOICE caused me to call in sick for Thursday and Friday as well. And…provided I get better by tomorrow, that should be all. But if not, I should really get to reading my contract for the extended pages on sick leave. I feel like I would be useless in class when I have no voice. You know? Deas-sensei, please pronounce this list of vocabulary words. *Awkward silence and confusion at the moving lips and sound of a goose drowning.* Deas-sensei, please tell us about your experience with this subject. *Giggles as I try again.* It would be awful. And I don’t want to screw my wonderful island schools out of their once a month visits from me. When I go, I want to be genki. I dunno. I have rescheduled my trip to Omishima. I hope I don’t need to cancel on Oshima on Monday. Murakami-sensei is expecting a baby, so they already have enough to deal with. Oh, yes. Woe is me. Plus, I am bored.
I beat The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess today. There is no more to the game, really. I think I’ll go have a stab at the Cave of Ordeals, or whatnot. But I was frankly a bit surprised by the end of the game. No spoilers, so no worries. All I know is that I spent a bundle of rupees in the 4,000 range to work up to and purchase an item, and beat the final bosses without ever touching it. Come to think of it, I never used most of the special stuff I got. I am too ridiculous about cutting the grass and breaking pots to keep myself at 100% all the time. I think that says something about me. It’s how I live my life, I think. Risks? Sure. But how risky are they when I am walking in armed to the teeth with weapons and things that I’ll never use? Ha ha. Oh well. C’est la vie. No, screw that. I should use Japanese on this blog. So…um….まあ、それは人生だなぁ。No idea if that translates. And it’s written colloquially, so don’t bother BabelFishing it. By the way, LoZ:TP was AWESOME Japanese practice for me. Tons of casual speech, some in wacked out dialects, and some from animals - who speak in katakana laced with kanji. Brutal. Yet awesome. Anyhoo - not much left to do there. It’s over now. Great game, though.
I spent my time today 1) finishing off my first Japanese videogame as aforementioned, 2) becoming a “Pro” quite by accident at Wii Sports’ tennis game, 3) installing WordPress 2.1 Ella and configuring it on my webserver, 4) repointing my domains to the appropriate places, 5) testing a flash-based audio player for future use and abuse, 6) calculating loan payment and plausible investment strategies for this year, and 7) sucking on cough drops. I hope I am better by tomorrow evening. Sigh.
PS - I also moved the text from all of my previous iWeb entries into my databases here. The pictures and stuff are too bothersome, so I am just gonna start anew from the next entry onward. I still have a lot of poking around to figure out photo management in WP. But hey, look how far I have come in this short amount of time. Got a theme, upgraded, backed up databases, worked with MySQL. I’m on a roll.
PPS - Took a quiz to see if I could sort out what was a Star Wars character and what was a Web 2.0 service. Got a 41. To people who got a 41 or 42, the site says: “No, really. Go outside or something. Ride a bike. Run barefoot through the grass. Get a pet. Anything.” Awww….I am indeed a loser. Take it for yourself. I’m looking at you, James, Michael, Nick, etc.
Yes I Rule (Sometimes)
My buddy Jacob challenged me in a bar a month or so ago. I accepted. He said he believes it to be impossible to sing or hum or whistle or otherwise reproduce the main themes to the above pictured films. Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Superman. The rules are simple. You must continue until the room reaches a general consensus that they recognize the theme and you aren’t way off the mark. You have only 10 seconds to regain your bearings before continuing on to the next theme. If you take too much time, you are disqualified. I finished the task, but they were iffy on my rendition of Superman. So iffy in fact, that Jacob stiffed me on the beer he had bet.
However, vindication was mine, for upon returning to our host for the evening’s humble abode, I looked up the tune on the internet and proved that I was merely singing the middle of the theme. He conceded the point, but alas, we were far from the bar, and there was no beer to be had. My challenge to you is to see if you can do it. No cheating!! I have included links to the three themes in MIDI format here. Check yourself afterward. Please report back, both successes and complete failures!
Star Wars Indiana Jones Superman
Also, in upcoming news, I am going to attempt to purchase and eat a “Big Russian.” I will put pictures up if I am able to procure and devour one. Ha ha ha. I’ll leave you hanging on what exactly it is - but rest assured, it is a food. 
Biking Home
Here’s a short video of what part of my bike ride home looks like. This was taken while I was riding home from the bus stop, which I use any time I go to Omishima or Oshima. I put the music in the front, but then I thought it was distracting, so I killed it a few seconds in. I tried this one in “high” quality, for the first time, and if it takes a billion years to load, I’ll redo the flash file and make it zippier. This 2 minute-ish file is larger than the 8 minute-ish video of my house…haha. Anyhoo, I hope you enjoy it!
Whirlwind Winter Break
Ooooook…the long overdue entry is finally arriving. Sorry for the timing. As you can see, I have been making some changes here. (See the previous entry for more information.)
Luke King is the ALT who lives on Iwagijima, one 10 minute ride on the express ferry from Hakatajima’s Kinoura Port. He’s a goofball Australian chap who actually teaches at Iwagi HS more than I do, despite its quasi-official status as “my” school. We frequently wind up teaching together, which is quite entertaining - and great for the 6 students (4 of whom are present on an average day). We discovered that we both neglected to take any action toward making winter plans a few weeks before the holidays were to start. So, we simply decided we’d do something together.
Seriously. That’s pretty much all we did. We had no plan. If you read earlier entries, you know that I had intended to hit Lake Biwa in Shiga Prefecture. Never did. Still haven’t been there. We honestly left Imabari without the foggiest idea about our adventures to come. Ok, we had a really foggy idea - ride the Orange Ferry, get off in Osaka, and mosey on over to Kyoto to crash at J-Hoppers. But that is as far as we got in our thinking. There is something kind of exciting about not having a clue what you’re up to and still having the courage (or stupidity) to go through with it anyway in a foreign country.
For us, things turned out quite well. We wound up staying at the J-Hoppers location for 6 days, despite their popularity and the time of year. We had to extend our stay twice, though, if I remember correctly. Lucky for us, some silly people canceled and we snagged first their spot in a dorm room, and then their private traditional room. Worked for us. Ha ha.
We basically hung out in Kyoto for the whole time, but we did make a day trip into Nara to see the park and accompanying shrines, as well as the famous bowing deer. While in Kyoto we saw the popular sights, such as Kinkakuji (The Golden Pavilion), The Imperial Palace & Gardens, endless shrines and temples, and the inside of at least 2 karaoke companies. We partied it up and had a good time. We also made a day trip out to see Fushimi Inari Taishya, which is still my favorite shrine in Japan - even when compared to Miyajima.
We met a ton of people at the hostel and made friends with almost all of them. The cast of characters for our posse included Clay (a JET in S-A-G-A Saga Prefecture), Chris (a JET in Kagawa Prefecture who is in love with YouTube…except not), Katha (a German gal who is studying in Tokyo), Megumi (a Japanese girl from Shizuoka who is in between jobs and finds herself passing through Kyoto), Josh (an absurdly talented guitarist and singer who I expect to become famous soon), Ethan (an Eikaiwa teacher with Japanese skills that made me really jealous), Yukako (a crazy Japanese girl working at the hostel who I decided to call Giovanna after a conversation about Italy), Rie (the manager of the hostel), Luke (obviously), me (obviously), assorted one-nighters at the hostel, and the assorted random guy from Columbia, SC who I bumped into on the street - sorry for forgetting your name already…
I had great fun on this trip. I left another picture of myself at the hostel. The first one is currently located on the 3rd floor, to the right of the door to the living room. It’s of me and my last hostel-friend, Toshi, eating at the best ramen place in Kyoto. (And yes, it was really really good.) This one is me, having my head crushed by a maniacal Colonel Sanders in front of a KFC in Nara where Luke stopped to buy some chips. No, I did not just make that up. It’s true.
After a wonderful series of 4 a.m. bedtimes and late outings, Luke and I turned our tired bums around and headed home. We decided to take the ferry again, because it is cheap, and it means you can get a good night’s sleep without paying for a hotel room. I can’t complain with that setup. One last thing we did before heading into Osaka to catch our boat…
We woke up and checked out by 10:40, just to make sure we beat the 11:00 deadline. The hostel folks were generous to offer us room to store our bags while we went out for the day. They also supplied me with a few newspaper articles…which I never requested…pertinent to the purchaseability of a certain new video game console…which is not available in Imabari… So, being a complete nerd and a bit of a jerk, I forced Luke to walk for what seemed like hours to find an electronics store from the paper. I walked in, and found that all the systems in question were labeled “Sold Out” on the shelves. Disheartened, I figured I might as well take the opportunity to ask the clerk if it was true - to get the pity stare if nothign else. To my surprise, he turned a sly eye downward and looked back up and said…”We have three.” Without much further ado, I plopped down my yen and bought myself a Christmas present - a Nintendo Wii and the new Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess game to go with it. Like I said - GOOD vacation. 