"This is a dear chicken transformation set. It is made from the two-tone felt cloth of yellow and orange, and even if it takes, it is finished to the pop impression. Please observe the feather of the chicken currently attached to the both sides of a hat. please imagine a profile when a cat covers it is as dear as it blows off involuntarily — since it can equip with the head volume to which the reed of a chicken also attached ??[sic] hat on a piece of Velcro, attachment and detachment are easy"
Found this hilarious site from Chanpon. It's called PetOffice, and the page I quoted above is here. I can't stop laughing at the pictures or the Engrish... ;D It's a bit scary the things people will do to their pets.
What is your favorite type of coffee?
I have different favorites for different purposes and occasions. When I'm driving a long way, I need to get Dunkin' Donuts coffee, and some donuts. They have extremely good coffee. The cups rock too, since they stay in the cup holders well, keep in the heat, and have enough structure to prevent buckling and spilling. :) They also use the really nice plastic tops that you can open and re-close...
When I'm playing Go, or talking with friends at a cafe, I get a latté or cappuccino... But when I'm just people-watching, or reading or hanging out, sometimes I like to get an espresso doppio machiatto, which is a double espresso with a bit of foam. That's for my coffee connoisseur mood. <grin>
But I have to get these in a porcelain mug or cup, unless it's to go. They just taste so much better that way. I think it's because of a couple of things -- the mug is slippery while the paper cup sticks to your lip, and sipping from the mug allows air in, while sipping from a paper cup with the lid doesn't.
This means there is a nicer texture and aroma from the mug.
Unfortunately, a lot of Starbucks Baristas balk when I ask them for my drink "for here," since they don't want to have to wash it when they close... Tough, I say! Gimme my mug, since I'm paying 2 bucks for an ounce of coffee... ;)
Funny enough, once I was in Tokyo, and typically, a certain café offered lattés but not cappuccinos. I looked behind the counter, and saw a totally automated machine with a button labelled "cappuccino." So I asked the girl if she would make it for me, and she wouldn't, saying that they weren't allowed to make anything not on the menu! Agggh...
Well, I went to my first meetup yesterday, for D.C. area bloggers... :) It took place at Visions, a neat sort of independent movie theater cum café near Dupont Circle.
I was a little apprehensive going into it, thinking that everyone who showed up might be "übergeeks," and it might be extremely awkward, but in fact, only the first few minutes were a bit awkward...
I showed up on time, but found that there was some college reunion going on. The place was packed with moviegoers as well. No one had signed up to be a "host" on meetup.com, so I figured it would be tough to find the others... There would be no signs or greeters. So, I just sat down conspicuously, hoping that someone would ask me what the heck I was doing there. :)
When the place started thinning out a few minutes later, someone named Jessica came over and asked me if I was there for the bloggers' meetup. It turned out that she was the girlfriend of the guy who does argmax, a very well known economics blog. We made a little sign out of a piece of paper, after which people started showing up regularly for about 2 hours... At its height there were probably about 10 people there. :)
Here are the sites of the people who showed up:
argmax
Vikram Raghavan
answerguy
quasipundit
Hradcany
It was pretty fun, and I'll probably go again the next time... It really made me understand that although blogging is taking off, many people still don't know that much about it, and although they're interested, they don't really know where to go for resources...
I'll try to help out in that respect by bringing some info with me next time. :)
[P.S.] I initially missed adding Hradcany to the list above. Must not have been written on the napkin when it passed me...
I have a new job this week, at the Department of the Interior. :) It should tide me over to when I start law school in mid August. I may work part time after that, but I'm not sure yet how things will turn out. I figure I'll have to devote most of my focus and time to school...
Well, Yuki and I went out with some high school friends last night to see the Matrix. It rocked. Except for the cheezy parts... ;)
Warning: I may spoil the movie for you, so stop reading here if you haven't seen it.
I think the best parts were seeing the guy in the mech suit in Zion, and seeing the Smith jump onto the car on the highway, crushing the hood. The flying scenes and other effects were great too. I actually found the part with the haughty German dude in the restaurant interesting and refreshingly different. The so-called plot was pretty non-existent though.
It was nice to see my high-school friends again. Many are in the D.C. area now, and more will be in New York soon... It's only 5 hours to New York by car, so it's not too bad. :)
I got a chimichanga at a restaurant in Georgetown before the show, and my friend mistakenly called it chichi manga, which we all know in Japanese would have meant "breast comic book." ;D We had a good laugh over that. Sometimes stupid things are the funniest, but have to be experienced in person. This all led to an interesting discussion on certain bawdier aspects of Japanese culture.
We went to the new theatre complex in Georgetown which has something like 17 theatres all with stadium seating. It's awesome. But it's always a nightmare driving in Georgetown. There's no subway stop there because the residents thought it would allow the bums and dregs to get there more easily. Not a good enough reason if you ask me. Luckily, I found a great parking lot for only 5 bucks. :)
I'm at Tryst in D.C. today, taking advantage of their free wireless. It's the only place advertising free wireless in D.C. right now, as far as I know, but I've heard that they're planning to make Dupont Circle a 'hotspot' as well... :) Dupont is a big area for nightlife, shops, restaurants, gay scene, etc. In the middle of the circle there is a fountain and a little park, where they're ostensibly planning to provide free wireless connectivity. Pretty cool. Now all I need is a wireless power source a la Nikola Tesla... ;)
By the way, how do you like my improvised sun shield? hehe.
Tryst is a nice café in Adams Morgan, another night life spot in D.C. There are about a million restaurants in this area, with every imaginable type of food. It's a cool area; I just wish I had the money to eat out all the time. Maybe after law school... (Aggh. Three whole years.......) :P'
Aggh! I absolutely abhor political correctness. This post by Jonathon is very interesting and disturbing. It reminded me of some of the very serious problems we face here in the U.S. with regard to education, and some similar sad problems in Japan.
So, first of all, as I've mentioned in the last few posts, the English language depends heavily upon both Latin and Greek for its neologistic capabilities, and for most of its more specific, detailed, and complex vocabulary. Without an understanding of these roots, one is unable to grasp fully the expressive capacity of English. I feel somewhat handicapped since I never learned Latin or Greek in school, so I'm trying to learn Latin now, but I have always had a good understanding of the word roots we commonly use.
We lose a lot when these subjects fail to be taught to the next generation. And now, not only are we losing connection with the upper reaches of our vocabulary, we're also losing all sorts of other things due to the irrational and excessive fear of offending young students. It's stupid, and I'm really upset when I'm forced to think about it. I'm probably not going to be satisfied to send my children to public school in this country, ironically the country where my Puritan ancestors built the first schoolhouses to teach from the King James Bible, and where we had such an incredible level of literacy and education up to the turn of the 19th century.
Similarly, Japan has lost a lot of the flavor of its language through excessive standardization, almost PC-ization of the kanji system. Ask any Japanese today about the stroke order of a character, and they'll say there is only one proper stroke order. In fact, for most characters there have always been alternate stroke orders, usually at least 2 or 3. There have been different styles to writing some characters, alternative forms, and stylizations that have been basically lost due to this standardization push.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be a standard. I'm just saying that the modern Japanese person has in many cases lost the intuitive understanding of style when it comes to kanji. People used to prefer certain forms of characters; now, only one is usually considered the 'right' form. People used to write characters with their own style. Now, many people resort to a child-like pencil style when writing characters. I just wish they hadn't gone so far sometimes. It would be nice if everyone could have an elegant and idiosyncratic calligraphic syle of their own.
A very long but interesting post at EmptyBottle thinking all about languages (esp. Korean) and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Pinker, etc.
I actually subscribe to what he calls the "weak formulation" of the theory -- that language as the ultimate medium does have somewhat of an effect on us, coloring our perceptions of things in certain ways, but not determining or truly limiting them. Languages just tend to portray the world in a certain way, reinforcing cultural perspectives, and possibly creating a sort of local minimum which it might take a little extra effort to jump out of...
With regard to confucian concepts imbued in Korean and Japanese, it's interesting to note that Chinese also had many formalisms that were totally stripped away with the communist revolution. Currently some of them are coming back, but only since the beginning of China's economic boom... For instance, to ask one's name the phrase used to be "您贵姓?", or "Your honorable name?". As I've learned and heard it most of the time in China, people now usually say "你的名字是什么?", or simply "What is your name?"
Also, I should mention Lojban, which is a constructed language specifically created with the goal in mind to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The language is constructed unlike any natural language. It's similar to LISP in some ways, actually... ;) But during college I and my friend Paul became sort of infatuated with it and learned a lot of it, even attempting to have conversations in it constantly... hehe. I still remember quite a bit, and talk to my wife in it occasionally. (She knows a few phrases...) Anyone interested should read the historical background information on their site, and do a search on it, since there are a number of other sites about it not linked to from their main page. :)
This post at EmptyBottle.org really got my blood boiling, as it did his, obviously... ;) He references an article in the New York Times which talks about Asian orthographies as opposed to Western alphabets...
In particular, it references a new book by William C. Hannas, "a linguist who speaks 12 languages and works as a senior officer at the Foreign Broadcast Information Service..." The hypothesis, or rather, the seemingly unproven assertion, which the book is based on is that Asian orthographies are a detriment to scientific and analytical thought.
The first major mistake the article makes is in asserting that Asian orthographies are "syllabaries." In fact, no asian orthography is exclusively a syllabary, although Japanese includes two. A syllabary is an 'alphabet' in which each symbol represents not just a letter as we know it in English, but a whole syllable of sound, such as "ka" or "ban".
Japanese includes two full syllabaries, called hiragana and katakana, as well as chinese characters and the roman alphabet. With regard to its use of Chinese characters, sometimes they are read with one syllable, sometimes two, and sometimes three or four, depending on the situation. There are even characters read as English words, such as 釦 (ボタン), for 'button'.
Korean is not a syllabary either, but a true alphabet, and far more logically constructed than western alphabets. The forms of all the letters are based in a phonetic analysis of ancient Chinese, and were created in the 1400's by King Sejong. Like sounds look alike in the Korean alphabet (such as T and D), because they were constructed to resemble the position of the mouth and tongue when uttering those sounds!
The only thing "syllabic" about the Korean orthography is that each syllable is arranged into a square when written. This came about due to the aesthetic and cultural influence of Chinese characters, and because of the desire to harmonize the look of text containing both Korean characters (hangul) and Chinese characters. So, for example the word kabang (bag) is written as 가방, in two blocks, rather than ㄱㅏㅂㅏㅇ, horizontally. You can see how the individual letters are just arranged into the two squares. But it's still probably the most logically and abstractly constructed alphabet in the world.
Chinese characters are not a syllabary either, because they are partly ideographic, partly phonetic, and inconsistent in how they are constructed. Some have called them 'logographic' or other things, but they are constructed in a variety of complicated ways, and are clearly not a syllabary.
Furthermore, the assertion that they inhibit abstract thought is bass ackwards, considering that the whole system was created based on abstract thought. Ideographic components are commonly combined with phonetic components to produce modern characters, as in the character for 'flower', 花, which combines 'flower/grass' on the top with the sound component 'hua' underneath. Sometimes two or more ideographic components are combined, as in the character for 'natural disaster', 災, which combines 'river' on the top with 'fire' on the bottom...
It's a complicated business, and clearly each character involves an ancient thought process of abstraction. Now in the sciences, Chinese compound words are much much easier to read than western terms, because we use latin and greek, while they use their characters. An example off the top of my head is the word for 'diabetes'. In English, you don't know what it is until you simply memorize the word, but in Japanese the word is 糖尿病, or sugar-urine-disease, probably because those who had it had sugary or sweet urine. SARS is called 非典型肺炎 in Chinese, and 新型肺炎 in Japanese, which mean non-traditional-lung-inflammation and new-form-lung-inflammation respectively. Much easier to parse (and direct to the point) than some of our medical terminology...
So now let's look again at Hannas's assertion as related in the article:
Mr. Hannas's logic goes like this: because East Asian writing systems lack the abstract features of alphabets, they hamper the kind of analytical and abstract thought necessary for scientific creativity.
Now how silly does this seem?
I must say though, in the case of Chinese, there are other reasons to suspect it really does cause everyday problems for people, but in the cases of Japanese and Korean, I don't think you can argue that at all.
In Chinese, there's really no reliable way to write anything unless you know the characters, whereas in Japanese and Korean, the alphabetic or syllabic characters are accepted parts of the language, and can always be used as fallbacks. Chinese has the 'pinyin' romanization system, but it's rarely used and isn't considered part of the language. So if you're not very literate, you may come across cases when you aren't able to write something you're thinking about... This still doesn't prevent you thinking about it though, and you can always look up the characters in a dictionary. There's really no way that it can hamper thought, just maybe make everyday note-taking or writing harder.
Interestingly, Korean may be entering a new era when their orthography becomes much more similar to western ones than eastern ones, in that the old compounds which were created and written with chinese characters are now written in hangul, their alphabet, so some of the compound word roots may become forgotten or harder for the average Korean to remember, just like our Latin and Greek roots... :)
P.S. Doesn't Unicode rock?! I could never have written this post a few years ago without resorting to images. Now we have Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and English, all playing well together! Sweet. ;)