Despite the fact that Valentine's Day was quite awhile back, my husband received the fun assortment of chocolates above from a student yesterday. He also got a box of truffles from the same student, and while they were lovely and sophisticated, they weren't quite as photogenic as the whimsical item pictured above.
The characters in white in the center of the label say "sushi". The banner with gold letters to the left says "special" and the real "joke" of this item are the black characters on the right which read as "cho-ko" though when written as kanji (Chinese characters), the words don't mean "chocolate" (choco), but (apparently) "sake cup". Somehow, I figure there must be another meaning I'm missing that applies to sushi. Usually, the word chocolate is not written in kanji, but rather in katakana which is the Japanese syllabary for (mostly) foreign words so it's sort of a joke. Ha. Ha. OK, we foreigners don't find the same amusement in Japanese wordplay as the Japanese might, but it's still cute.
Click this picture to see detail.
The contents are mainly blocks of chocolate wrapped in plastic with pictures of various seafood items on them, though the small packet filled with green balls is full of super sweet white chocolate bits coated with shiny green candy. These balls might be meant to resemble fish roe, I imagine, though I'm not sure (particularly since roe is reddish in color). They do look suspiciously like the stuff my father used to bait his hooks with from time to time when he went fishing. However, the packet itself has a picture of gnarled wasabi roots and says "wasabi choco" so perhaps this was the best they could do to emulate small amounts of wasabi. The candy also has an odd aftertaste which may actually be wasabi flavoring. The packaging is very well done right down to having the omnipresent fake plastic "grass" that you see in sushi assortments and a real wood container (that smells quite nice).
The chocolate with a picture of a shell on it has some funny English on it. On the front, around the shell, it says:
"Scallop stands a sail and runs all over the seas."
On the back, it says:
"There was a dog to which the sea is crossed. The ear was pinched with the husks of HOTATE."
"Hotate" apparently means "sail upright" in one of its incarnations, though it can also mean "pilgrim". Without Chinese characters, it's impossible to know but all the talk of the sea makes the sailing definition likely, yet somehow, renders the sentence it is a part of no more logical.
Sometimes I see something in Japan that I really can't understand or explain. For instance, when I worked in Shinjuku, there was a used record, video, and movie paraphernalia shop which had a 6 foot rubber and vinyl replica of the nightmarish hideous gooey saliva-dripping monster from Alien. As you stepped off the elevator, you came face to grotesque alien chest with it. At first, it had a sign on it which proudly proclaimed "not for sale", as if any sane person would want to put this thing in their small Japanese home. Later, it had a sign on it offering to let you have it for the grudgingly low price of around a half million yen ($4,600). As time went by, the price dropped to 300,000 yen ($2,760). I'm pretty sure the price at one point fell to something in the 100,000's ($900's). Eventually, it disappeared. While I guess it's possible that it was snapped up by someone who thought it'd be really cool to stick this in the corner of his bedroom so he could scare the hell out of himself when he woke up in the middle of the night and forgot he'd forked over a ton of money for it, I believe it's more likely that it was put out late one night with the rest of the dai gomi (big trash).
Since that time I haven't seen anything so unattractive that I seriously questioned the marketing skills, aesthetic sense, and sanity of someone... until now. If you look at the face at the top of this post, you can probably understand why I'm raising such questions again.
There is a shop named "Booby Trap" which apparently is ran by someone who paid good money to put that grotesque face on the body of a mannequin outside his or her shop. I have to wonder if the proprietor believes that seeing someone dressed like a mad thug who wants to grab your purse and knife you in the belly will attract the fashion-conscious young Japanese person into the store.
Generally, mannequins are meant to model a look that the consumer may want to emulate, but this one looks more like he's part of a campaign to prove foreigners are scary people. Of course, for all I know, the ultimate disposition of that hideous thing will be placement in some government office with a warning. One of these days, I'm guessing it'll eventually end up with a price tag that keeps dropping until the shop manages to unload it just like the Alien statue.
Given a choice, I'd much rather have the Alien alien in my apartment then the guy standing in front of Booby Trap.
Anpanman is a popular cartoon character in Japan, particularly among the age range that spans from the diaper-wearing to the not-quite-interested-in-the-opposite-sex-yet-but-starting-to-get-curious set. Anpanman is sort of like the Japanese version of Superman... if Superman's head was made out of a bun filled with sweetened beans which was replaceable with a new bun any time it got wet or dirty. He fights against evil (mainly germs) though considering that water and dirt are his version of Kryptonite, I'd think evil could easily get the best of him with a squirt gun or a bucket of mud. Given the Japanese obsession with food, it seems very appropriate that a superhero is made of a traditional foodstuff.
I think his greatest strength lies in his power to act as a corporate shill and convenient icon to place on toys, clothes, and other products in order to get kids to compel their parents to buy them Anpanman-themed goods. In fact, if he used this power wisely, he could wipe out all the germs in the world by asking his legions of little followers to whine until their mommies scrubbed every dirty surface spotlessly clean.
All hail Anpanman and kneel in supplication and he shall reward you with clean domiciles and fresh, tasty, wholesome bean cakes!
On New Year's day, my husband and I stumbled across this idol erected for the tiny worshipers of Anpanman attached to a fire escape. It is conveniently placed at a height at which his followers are forced to look up at him but can easily see him without craning their necks as they kneel before him. Since this Anpanman church was closed due to the national holiday (and I'm certain they didn't want to be disrespectful and draw all the foot traffic away from the nearby Shinto shrine... as it surely would have had folks been allowed to stand at the feet of this brightly-colored Anpanman idol), we didn't witness any followers paying homage to him on the day the picture was taken. However, I'm pretty sure that his followers bow and face his statue several times a day in humble supplication.
The What Japan Thinks blog of the year contest has concluded and the winners have been announced, and, I won the category of "best personal blog". I'd like to thank all the nice folks who took the time to vote for me and who read my (almost) daily prattle. I'd especially like to thank the mystery person who nominated me in the first place! I'd give each of you a peanut butter cookie if I could.
I've recommended it before, but, if you aren't a regular reader of "What Japan Thinks", I suggest you become one. It's one of the few resources with objective data about Japanese people, their opinions, and behaviors which you can find in English. It's a good resource from which to learn more about Japan and help temper our subjective conclusions and from which to understand the context of our (anecdotal) experiences in Japan.
And, yes, I'd be making this endorsement even if I hadn't won!
The box that the mugs come in says "The Simpsons Christmas pair mug" on top of it.
This morning my husband went out for donuts at Mister Donut (for breakfast) and came back with the items pictured above. The Simpsons movie promotion has expanded to offering a special Christmas deal. The box on the bottom (with the tree) has 4 mont blanc cakes (strawberry, chocolate, chestnut, and green tea).
You can buy the box of 4 cakes and 2 Simpsons Christmas mugs for 1000 yen ($8.83). Each cake sells for 189 yen ($1.67). That means you get the mugs along with your fattening treats for 244 yen ($2.15) for the pair of them which is quite reasonable.
If you have any friends or family back home who are Simpsons fans, you might want to pick up the cups. I can't say for certain as I haven't conducted any extensive searches, but I don't believe these are available in the U.S, and they're very cute.
The phrase "it's the thought that counts" is often used when people open a gift that was probably inexpensive or homemade. Sometimes it's even used when a gift is not really reflective of the interests of the recipient when, ironically, there was probably little thought or thoughts that indicate the giver didn't know the recipient very well at all.
It's rarely the case that someone utters the aforementioned phrase in a positive way which shows that they recognize a gift was very thoughtful. This is a tendency I'd like to change starting with one of the most thoughtful gifts I have ever received in my life from my friend, Shawn. I received a large surprise box from him for Christmas and was shocked and delighted by the contents.
Click to see a larger, more detailed picture.
To give you some idea of how Shawn did such an excellent job of making such a thoughtful gift, I'll tell you that we play an on-line game 2-3 times a week and chat via Skype while we play. On more than one occasion, I've lamented about my inability to cook something because of a lack of proper spices or ingredients in Japan. Shawn appears to have taken note of everything I mentioned and sent along whatever it is I didn't have and added a few lovely surprises. It's a care package that really shows care.
He also managed to provide me with a Christmas tree (after I blogged that my old one had gone to plastic tree heaven). And he sent me a monkey that yells when you launch it. There is very little cooler than a flying monkey!
I'm simply overwhelmed by how closely he listened to me and provided everything I talked about in our conversations. (I'm also impressed that he sent this huge heavy box by airmail at great expense.) It shows a great deal of thought and I can't express in words how much I appreciate that. Thank you, Shawn! I'll never forget this. :-)
What Japan Thinks is holding a contest for "best Japan" blogs in a variety of categories and one of my kind readers nominated me in the category of "personal blogs". If any of my other kind readers would like to pop over and vote for me, I'd be grateful. :-) You can vote at this link.
Even if I don't win, I'm pleased that What Japan Thinks is holding this contest because it will encourage folks to check out a variety of blogs they may have been unaware of previously.
As western (well, mainly American) cartoon characters go, they're not as well-loved or known as Peanuts or Disney characters, but they have appeared in their fair share of product endorsements. In the past, they've appeared in endorsements for C.C. Lemon drink among other things.
The T.V. series has been running on Japanese T.V. for quite some time though I've never actually spoken with any Japanese person who actually watches the show regularly. One of my more television-loving students told me she doesn't like the show because the humor is too mean-spirited. However, given that Fox runs the show a few times a day (seemingly every day), someone must like it.
The Simpsons movie opened in Japan yesterday and, among other promotions, Mister Donut has been using boxes with images from the movie.
There are also some confections which get a little Simpsons wrapping around them such as the montblanc pictured above. This particular item was unusually good in a bad way. The cake used in it was amazingly similar to the sponge in an American Twinkie.
Personally, I wouldn't go to see the Simpsons movie in a Japanese theater because the tickets cost about the same as purchasing the DVD from Amazon and I'd rather spend the money on a permanent copy than a one-time experience. I've also found in my limited experience seeing movies in Japan that theaters aren't all that great. The acoustics sucked at the last place I went and they tend to be pretty overheated. Mind you, the last movie I saw in a theater was Star Trek VI. ;-)
I wish the Sheldon comic (pinched from the Sheldon site, which everyone should read everyday because it's momentous uberness should not be denied) I've pasted above had been available when I wrote my "Know It All" post. Of course, if it had been, I wouldn't have had to be so verbose.
Now, I have no choice but to bring it to your attention after the fact in what will appear to be a very cheap attempt to boost my post account for this month. Rest assured, I don't give a toss about post counts. However, I do care about directing readers to a really good web comic which makes points I want to make.
Sammy and Sam. Sam is my second hand-made Christmas ornament from Lanin at N'Toonz based on one of my favorite Internet comic strips, Melonpool. Lanin can turn 2D pictures into wonderful 3D polymer clay sculptures. This year, try to buy some hand-crafted items rather than mass-produced dreck for Christmas. You'll make two people happy - yourself and the artist.
One thing the Internet allows us to do is see exactly what people around the world are capable of. Talented folks place their photography, art, and writing on the Internet where it can be freely accessed and enjoyed. Most of the time, I find myself impressed by just how good so many people are. The sheer volume of talented people out there boggles the mind.
Unfortunately, most of those talented individuals are competing for attention with a great many others and it's difficult to attract people to your web site. There's so much content to consume that you are lucky if people contribute a few seconds or minutes of their day to your site, let alone offer any of their cash as a contribution to you, make an effort to visit your advertisers, or buy products related to your site's content.
I read a good many sites which offer up the fruits of various folks creative labor and, occasionally, they post about how disheartened they are because they toil long and hard but seem neither to get more readers nor make any appreciable money from their endeavors. In part, this is a reflection of too many entertainers competing for an audience with too little time to attend to them all. It's also a sad fact that the avenue by which thousands of creative people can make their work known is one that is popular in large part because content is "free" and people rarely go out of their way to financially support the sites that they enjoy. They do this either because they can't afford to or they feel entitled to have content without paying for it.
For my part, I try very hard to empathize with these folks and put myself in their shoes. I like to be paid for my work so I do what I can to pay for theirs. I send donations and buy items (usually books) related to their content. My husband also does his part to support content of value by paying for premium subscriptions to various sites. I want to live in a world where creativity and talent are rewarded so I have to be act in a way that contributes to that kind of world.
There are some creative people who would be very happy if you contributed the amount of one cup of coffee or tall latte to them once a year as a way of thanking them for the entertainment they offer you on a daily basis. Even if you love a dozen sites, you can afford to give them each a little money just one month of the year as a way of thanking them and voicing your conviction that creative content deserves to be rewarded and confirming that you value the work they do. Doing so also allows you to offer an affirmation that you want to live in a world where people whose labor makes your life a little brighter should and can (hopefully) make a living doing so.
Halloween isn't officially celebrated in Japan but there are pockets of celebrations. One of the most famous is the controversial Yamanote line "party" (covered here on Japan Probe) in which members of the foreign community along with their Japanese friends party on trains on the most heavily traveled train line in Tokyo. They dress up, drink, and are generally noisy and get in the way of regular travelers when they try to use the train. Some people find it highly interesting and some find it annoying.
In the past, language schools have also been known to make a lot of hay at this time of year. Nova used to hold parties in which teachers could freely associate with students in their off hours for the sake of free food and drink. When I worked at Nova, students had to pay a fee to go to the party but attendance was not mandatory for teachers so I didn't go. The dressing up part of such parties was very attractive even if the begging door-to-door for treats hasn't caught on.
My friend Shawn, transformed into a giant conglomeration of candy corn, stands in front of a trick-or-treat goodie bag.
For me, I found my celebration in the same place I always do for holidays that aren't observed in Japan, in the online game Guild Wars. It's virtual but that doesn't make it much less fun and it certainly makes it far less troublesome. I don't have to put up with nasty little children ringing my doorbell incessantly and demanding candy under threat of eggs on my door or toilet paper around my trees (not that I have any trees where I live now).
My friend Shawn looking strangely sanguine in the mouth of a Charr as it chomps him down in its cardboard jaws.
My bestest buddy Tankarific Carl chats with a real Charr. He's offering the Charr some catnip and a ball of yarn if he promises not to use him as a scratching post.
The Guild Wars experience allows us to travel around to areas decorated with pumpkins, ghosts, and a cut-out of an enemy which we can stand behind and put our faces in as a way of looking like it's eating us. People are everywhere wearing pumpkin heads and various masks as well as changing into candy corn (thanks to transmogrifier potions). We also get to drink absinthe and get virtually bombed and spring ghosts out of boxes.
Mad King Thorn bosses us around amongst the ghost posies. A candy corn guard stands by in case the crowd develops a taste for pumpkin pie and splits open his head to feast on the goo inside.
The real treat of the Halloween festivities though is being present for the arrival of Mad King Thorn. This is where you play games within the game for bags of treats. The King asks you to play rock, paper, scissors with select players, a version of "Simon Says", and orders you to deduce a required action from statements he makes. If you fail at any time, he kills you. It's a lot like childhood party games in more ways than one, well, except for the dying part if you fail. The funny thing is that you're just as likely to mess up on something like "Simon Says" at your keyboard as you are in real life and everyone around you laughs at you when you screw up just like they would in real life.
Tankarific sports the scarecrow mask he got at the end of the King's first visit. He also has a mummy mask from a subsequent visit.
In the end, you get a Halloween mask as a gift when the King leaves no matter how many times you fail at his games and commands. Since I'm worse at his simple games than I am at the far more complex real game, it's good for me that he's generous even to the most incompetent players.
Gaming circles are like little closed societies. They have rules that you may not understand, make jokes that you don't get, and may interact in ways that make you feel left out. The oft-used scene in movies and television where you see 3 or 5 geeks sitting around a board playing "Dungeons and Dragons" and engaging in dialog which makes absolutely no sense is meant to bring this home. It's also used to make you think gamers are strange in their insularity.
The level of weirdness you perceive is largely a function of how familiar you are with the "culture" of a particular game. If you were a part of it in any way, you are less likely to see the gamers who are actively embracing it as strange. One of my friends (Shawn, hello loony!) told me that on-line gaming has become mainstream enough for commercials to include references to World of Warcraft. There's a commercial for the Toyota Tacoma.
There's also one for Coke.
(There are more but I'm not going to embed them all since this post will be long enough without them.)
This is an indication of one of several possible things. One is that the target demographic for these (and other products) is squarely in the same demographic for playing World of Warcraft. It could also mean that there are enough people out there playing this game that the references may make sense to most people either because they play or they have someone in their families who does.
If you watch these videos, you'll notice that the joke is in the insertion of game elements into real life or vice versa. Despite the fact that gaming society is often seen as weird and idiosyncratic by those who have never been a part of it, the truth is that people pretty much behave the same as they do in real life. Here are a few examples based on my personal experience:
The Aggressive Salesman:
In games, there is an economy just like there is in real life. Just as gold and jewels have greater value in the real world, items which are scarce and highly-valued have greater value in the game world. The only difference is that game gold isn't always the most precious commodity depending on the game's mechanics.
My husband and I have experienced opportunistic players who will try to undercut your "prices" for game goods in Diablo II. The way we trade in this particular game is to make a new game (which anyone can see the name of and join) which is named in such a fashion as to state clearly what we have and what we want in exchange for it. Invariably, people will pop in who have the same item to offer at a somewhat lower price. Considering that all they have to do is make their own game and name it with their lower price, this is akin to someone jumping in and trying to steal your customer away by offering the item you have on sale for $25 for only $20.
Since it takes no effort at all to make games, this is rather rude and selfish but I'm sure it's the sort of thing that people would happily do in real life if they wouldn't get kicked off the store premises for trying to undercut the competition. As it is, stores do have their variation on this by offering to beat the price on an item their competitor offers if you offer proof of a lower price.
The Bully:
In gaming, bullies are often called "griefers." This is a concept that was rather famously played out in one of the best episodes of South Park of all time. Like real life bullies, they attack only those who are vastly weaker than themselves so that their "victory" is assured. In role-playing games, you play characters who "age" by gaining levels. Higher level characters have greater strength and life and are nearly impossible for vastly lower level characters to defeat. It's akin to an 18-year-old beating up a 5-year-old. What is worse than that is that characters that have played a lot and racked up a lot of levels tend to have superior equipment so it's like that 18-year-old wearing steel-plated armor and wielding a gun while the 5-year-old is equipped with his bare hands and donning a wet paper sack.
The reason such in-game bullies are called "griefers" is that their purpose isn't to prove their superiority but to spoil the game for other players. When they enter a game full of lower level players, their intent is to spoil the experience. Weaker players who were enjoying playing together and accomplishing a mutually-desired goal often scatter to the winds when a griefer comes in and smashes them.
The Bosses, Their Followers, Their Challengers:
If you've worked in an office, you know that there are people who gain positions of authority either through nepotism, force of their characters, charm, or superior skills. There are also the subordinates who will either blindly follow the leader or undermine his or her credentials to be in such a position and seek to unseat their superiors. In gaming, the same situation often plays out among those who choose to play with regular groups.
The interesting thing is that the very same factors that tend to play into gaining a position of authority in real life play into getting one in a gaming society. Players who have game "wealth" frequently attract groups of hangers-on who benefit from their largess. The rich players shed their "lesser" and duplicated game gear and shower their devoted followers with such gifts. The wealthy players often form a following of another type of player, the beggar, who is constantly asking for better equipment either overtly or obliquely when amongst other more experienced players.
Additionally, having familial or real life connections to someone who is in a position of power may allow you to ascend to their level when they grow bored and give up the game. Of course, there are also those who become leaders through superior skills. If there is a difficult goal to attain and someone persistently is capable of accomplishing it where others fail, that person may gain followers and be a default leader, at least intermittently. In my experience, however, such players tend to play alone most of the time (which is how they hone their skills in the first place) and tend not to seek leadership roles. I suspect this is because the liability associated with being a leader is you have to drag along a lot of incompetents when playing and the dubious value of their allegiance to you is not worth the hassle of failing repeatedly due to their feckless playing.
The Attention Seekers:
There's always some kid in your class who is doing something to attract attention to himself or some guy at work who meanders around to their coworkers' desks making stupid jokes or who laughs too loud so everyone notices him. Games have their versions of these folks as well.
There are actually several sub-divisions of such attention seekers in games. One of the most common seems to be the sexually-obsessed types who take every opportunity to make a risque joke, sexual innuendo, or flirtatious comment. The worst of these is incredibly persistent and I'm guessing looking to fulfill an inner need to be sexually-desired through in-game banter. Another flavor of such types offers up a lot of witless scatological humor. Just like the dumb classmates you had in elementary school who liked to make farting noises in their armpits, such game players think they're absolutely hilarious when they talk about passing gas or mentioning their breasts, posteriors, or genitalia.
The "Mommies":
Don't mistake the idea of a "mommy" for someone who will look after you all the time. Mothers are just as likely to tell you what to do all the time and scold you when you fail as they are to bandage your wounded knee and offer soothing words. In games, there are those who try to protect the weaker and less-experienced players and help them accomplish the game goals. The pushier "mommies" though will also insist that you do everything exactly as they say or they will withdraw their care.
The Altruists:
A similar type of player to the "mommy" is "the altruist". This is a person who sometimes helps out people just for the sake of offering up an act of kindness. This is the same sort of person in real life who will give a homeless person money or food. Just like in real life though, your attempts to help sometimes bite you in the ass later. Just as beggars who you give money to may try all the harder to extract cash from you next time they see you walking down the street, generous gamers may find themselves being constantly nagged for assistance.
In games, altruism can sometimes be misconstrued as an attempt to find an opportunity to be a griefer, particularly in regards to assisting with quests and whatnot. I'll admit that I'm, on occasion, an altruist player and have been known to take a much higher level character into games to assist lower level players with especially difficult quests only to be told to "get the hell out" and called a great many profanities because the assumption is that the only reason I could be there is to turn on people and attack them at the worst possible moment.
Functioning effectively in various gaming worlds has a lot in common with how the real world works. It's not a bunch of anti-social weirdos engaging in strange activities but a bunch of normal folks playing out the same sort of roles that people do in real life. The only difference is that the basic rules for success are different and people who might never have a chance to assume such roles in real life may find they have the skills to play them out in the gaming world.
When some unexpected misfortune befalls me, I often lament to my husband that life is full of surprises and almost all of them are bad. If there is to be karmic balance in our lives, it should seem that good and bad luck should be served up in equal measures.
Psychologists probably would say that we only take note of the extraordinary and the negative. The idea is that we take the good things in life for granted and only notice the bad. That's the psychologists' way of saying we're all a bunch of big whiners who fail to recognize how good we have it. Nonetheless, I do believe that, if we documented all the things which we don't expect which are bad and all the unexpected things which are good, the bad is going to win by a country mile.
All that being said, I do have things pretty good and I'm not going to complain about something. In fact, the whole point of this post is to place a note in my personal history about something someone did for us which was a very kind and generous surprise. Yesterday, the doorbell rang and, after we grilled the delivery man to see who he was (we don't answer or open the door blithely around these parts). The postman had a package from Amazon with the two sets of DVDs pictured below.
Yes, I like old movies, even bad ones.
These two boxes of movies were on my wish list and, at first, I thought that I'd somehow managed to accidentally order them and I was all geared up for a big bout of annoyance when I looked at the invoice and saw these were a gift from someone we hadn't been in contact with for years. Back when we were posting daily sumo results and descriptions of bouts on GEnie, we met a really nice fellow who we set up an exchange of video tapes with. He would send us U.S. television and we'd send him sumo footage. Eventually, our interest in sumo diminished and he got access to sumo coverage via cable or satellite and we lost touch.
The notes on the invoice we got said that he ran across our wish list and decided to send us these. It was a genuine shock to just get a gift from someone out of the blue, particularly someone who we hadn't been in touch with for so long. It just goes to show that spontaneous good things do happen when you least expect them.
There are two types of people in the world. One group gets "the goofy" and the other does not. The half that gets it has the ability to hear about special days like "Talk Like a Pirate Day" and find the humor in it. The other half thinks it is pretty stupid. I'm pretty sure that the half that understands goofiness has provided a lot of the fuel for the fire that made Monty Python popular.
Since I'm one of those people who embraces the goofy, the absurd, and the incomprehensibly strange in the interest of humor, I have endeavored to put more of said humor out into the universe in the hopes that it will take hold and reproduce like an extra-fertile rabbit. To that end, I have embraced what my friends and I have come to call "the Carl". I understand that this notion is incomprehensible to most people but let's just say that it has to do with not taking things seriously that should not be treated so and with spinning the mundane around until it becomes ridiculous.
Tankarific Carl stands majestically amongst the candles of the new CARL guild hall and ponders who will be scooping up all the mini-pet poop that is bound to get left on the floor of our new joint.
It also means not taking yourself too seriously, of course. Our little group of players in the multi-player game "Guild Wars" did just that when we came up with a name ("Confused and Ridiculously Los"t) for our Guild (screenshot above). The delightful thing about it is that it's actually true of our playing style. You cannot be a Carl and be efficient or competent because such things impede your ability to mine the mundane for humor. Happy people stop and smell the roses. Carls stop and figure out how to make them funny.
Of course, there is far more to the Carl and one of these days, I'll even try to explain the origins of it or consider sharing the Carl words of power. However, the world is not yet ready.
Image pinched from Amazon's page on Cabin Boy where you can pick it up for the bargain price of $9.99!
Today is "Talk Like a Pirate Day" and, once again, I recommend everyone avail themselves of this opportunity to act a bit stranger than usual. Last year, I made some celebratory recommendations. This year, I've got a few more.
Wanna buy a monkey?
First off, I'm going to watch "Cabin Boy" and I recommend you consider doing so as well. While it isn't actually about pirates, it does contain obnoxious salty dogs and is incredibly goofy. That's about 80% of what being a pirate is all about. Chris Elliot does his usual somewhat weird (and sad but not too sad to undermine the fun) man-child routine to very good effect here. It also contains a classic (and rare big screen) David Letterman moment. A snippet of Dave's short scene was parodied in his one-time-only hosting of the Oscars and I wish I could find a link to YouTube showing it or had already digitized it myself as it's probably the shining moment from that particular Oscars extravaganza.
A lot of people don't "get" Cabin Boy's humor. It helps if you've watched any of the old Dynamation movies from the 60's as it plays on a lot of the concepts in movies like Jason and the Argonauts or the Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. It twists the characters like the cyclops and other giant monsters comedically. If you can't get into the spirit of this sort of parody, then probably you won't enjoy Cabin Boy. It also helps if you've ever played any of the Monkey Island games since it's about as close to a live action version of the games as we're likely to ever see. Chris Elliot is a lot like Guybrush Threepwood though quite a bit more arrogant.
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(And finally) Arrr, if you can't talk like a pirate and need some remedial trainin', Me recommend you go har for a translation.
I haven't done any posts for awhile about souvenirs or gifts students have given my husband or me. One of the reasons is sheer laziness, particularly with going to the trouble of taking a picture but another is that most of the gifts have been nice but unremarkable. My husband brought home some chocolates the other day which we both found interesting.
This particular box of chocolates comes with 4 Trivial Pursuit cards and 24 miniature chocolate bars. The cards are in German so we can't read them but the concept is one I believe we'd never see back home in the U.S. There are a few reasons I think this and the primary one relates to the fact that I think, by and large, Trivial Pursuit is a game designed to attract adults and chocolate is mainly something targeted at children. The combination of these two things seems to be a way of encouraging people to see these as two great things that go great together, sort of like a game version of a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.
The other reason I think it wouldn't be offered in the U.S. is that I believe Trivial Pursuit isn't something America finds all that attractive anymore. In fact, after the initial boom, I don't think many people were all that into it because they found the game too difficult for them. My husband and I used to play Trivial Pursuit and bought some of the later card sets and found that they seemed to be dumbing them down and specializing them in an attempt to make the game easier for people with a less than stellar general knowledge.
Of course, that's not to say I was incredibly great shakes at the game. While I did very well with science, art, literature, and entertainment, I was hopeless at sports and recent American history (though I was fine at earlier history and world history for the most part). For instance, while my husband knew everything Richard Nixon had done wrong and who had caught him, I was clueless about such details. Anyone with an interest in politics or baseball scores had a distinct advantage compared to someone who knew who painted "The Birth of Venus" or who had read "The Catcher in the Rye".
Back when we were playing this game though, the absolute worst category for me was sports. I didn't know anything about any sport (and still don't except for sumo) and it became a running joke that I would answer any sports question with "Pete Rose" even though I knew he was a baseball player and the question was about hockey or football. There were many occasions where I couldn't finish or win the game because I'd be trying repeatedly for that last sports and recreation piece of the plastic pie and never happen upon the type of question (recreation) which I had a shot at getting right. If it wasn't a question about playing jacks (or a non-sports game) or a scandalous and notorious sports personality in the last 5 years, I wasn't going to get the question right.
While, we did enjoy playing Trivial Pursuit together, my husband had too great an advantage and I too great a disadvantage and all the games ended the same way (with me chasing around that last orange wedge and never getting it). It was better when we teamed up with other people but our friends were often from other countries (the U.K., Australia, etc.) and our American version of the game carried a distinct bias for America-based information which was unfair to them. In the end though, computer games which took up less space to play and store usurped the role of board games in our lives. In fact, I'd pretty much say that Warcraft II was the first nail in the coffin of the more gentle days of sitting around a board, rolling a die and racking our brains to answer questions on cards.
If you spend a brief amount of time in Japan, you see people walking around in shirts with funny English on them. If you spend a brief amount of time looking at blogs written by people living in Japan, you see pictures of these sorts of shirts.
Foreign people aren't sure who thinks up the English for these shirts. Sometimes, they are random words and some seem to be long strings of ideas which don't quite come together. One thing is for sure, the Japanese don't care about what these things say in English. They know it's wrong but the lettering itself just looks cool to them.
One of my students wore such a shirt to a lesson last week which made me think that not all the designs are blithely tossed out there or random. Her shirt is not pictured because it would have been rather inappropriate (and rude) for me to ask her to let me snap a picture of her torso for my blog. The shirt she was wearing had the word "sagacious" written down along it in black dots about 8 times with the letters "TNFLTP" written in red about 6 times in front of the repeated"sagacious". If I had seen this as a random shirt on the street, I would have wondered what on earth it was on about and then forgotten it but the student asked me what it meant. I knew "sagacious" meant "shrewd" or "intelligent" but had no idea about TNFLTP.
I looked it up using Google and discovered these letters are part of a genetic sequence. Since I'm not an expert in genetics, I don't know if these letters were coincidentally part of a genetic sequence or if the entire shirt was a sly "in joke" about "intelligent" (sagacious) genes. Following my research a bit further, the sequence seemed to have been related to the DNA of Japanese rice but I'm afraid I was well in over my head at that stage in terms of understanding things. It did make me wonder though if there is hidden meaning or humor in a lot of the funny English shirts we see.
When my student and I discussed this issue, she mentioned that the Japanese don't think clothing with Japanese words is "cool" and they find it pretty unappealing by and large. She said that she noticed when she was in Hawaii that there were people with Japanese/Chinese characters as tattoos as well as on their clothes and that they were often as funny to her as English on shirts is to us.
She said that one of the funniest she saw was a man with a tattoo on his back of a character which meant "sheep". She found it particularly amusing because this was a pretty well-built, masculine fellow walking around with this absurd tattoo, possibly thinking it was really cool.
Back when I was taking high school art classes, we were required to experiment with a number of techniques for various projects. One of those projects was constructing a layered "3D poster" by building up elements using thick poster board. This required you to sub-divide your art into portions that were "flat" on the lowest level (the main "canvas") and elements which were to be cut out of a separate sheet of board and pasted on top of the first sheet.
For my project, I chose to reproduce KISS's "Rock and Roll Over" cover art (pictured above). If you look at it, you can see there is a lot of intricate work around the top of the hair and I happened to choose the black portion of the inner area as my second layer. That meant I had to trace it onto poster board and cut it out with an Xacto-knife. My high school art teacher was convinced that I would not be able to successfully carve out the intricate edges around the tops of the heads and tried to dissuade me from this undertaking. Rabid KISS fan that I was, however, I would not be dissuaded and I did just fine. The end result was quite nice. Unfortunately, this bit of artwork is long gone now.
This sort of art is appealing for a large-scale decoration because it has texture and depth. While posters and pictures are quite flat, this sort of thing feels more "alive". One thing I had decided in redoing the living room is that I wanted to add more texture in general to the decor (hence the Indian woven fabric on my T.V. stand with nubby thread running through it as a design).
The model art created in Adobe Illustrator.
With the memory of this in mind and the gaping black space above my T.V. tasking me, I decided to give this sort of project a less ambitious (but hopefully more stylishly-themed) go. As I mentioned in a previous post, I decided to go with something chess themed. The first stage was designing the basic elements in Adobe Illustrator (as I mentioned and showed in my original post). Though drawing the pieces, particularly the knights, was somewhat tricky, this was actually the easy part of the project since making perfect lines and boxes is simple on the computer.
The next stage was to take a piece of corrugated plastic that was about 5 feet x 4 feet in size and cut out a 600 mm x 600 mm square. Since the sheet was so huge and unwieldy and I had no place to keep it, It was a serious struggle cutting it down to size. The bottom edge isn't perfect by a long shot but it's otherwise pretty decently done.
The next step was to measure and draw on the chess board grid with a pencil. I had hoped to avoid painting the white portion by erasing the lines when I was finished. Since I didn't have a 60 mm straight edge, I had to do this with a metallic self-rewinding tape measure and it was no picnic.
Next, I cut out 32 60 mm x 60 mm squares to use as raised tiles for half the board. This was actually much harder to do straight than one might expect because the blade kept slipping into the hollow part of the corrugated plastic and shearing. The final squares are barely adequate but I had little choice short of finding a new material to work with. Since I didn't want to work with cardboard or paper (because I'm afraid it'll develop problems in the super humid summer followed by the super dry winter), I decided to just accept the imperfection.
The picture above shows the squares and a sample sheet for the pieces graphic. I painted one square yellow and one blue to color test them against the black pieces. My husband wasn't too keen on the yellow so I thought I'd give blue a shot. Unfortunately, the blue was too dark so I went with the yellow.
Painting 34 (two spare) squares of plastic yellow is pretty messy and I ended up with yellow fingers from trying to hold them while painting them edge to edge. They ended up needing two coats of paint because of streaks.
You can see the ragged bottom edge pretty well here but it won't be as visible when it's completed.
After mulling over various methods of attaching the squares, I settled on using double-sided tape because it is instant, clean, and easy to pull off if I make a mistake. Using a straight edge, I taped them down with extra-thin tape from the 100 yen store.
After the yellow squares were attached, I painted the rest of it white because the pencil lines would not erase clean. I used a cut up postcard to protect the edges of the yellow squares from the white in between but it still smudged over on occasion. You can clearly see the corrugation of the plastic even through 3 layers of white paint. This is actually fine with me as it adds more texture to the piece.
The board was the hardest part. I knew that if anything was going to go wrong, it would be with its construction. While it's not as perfect as I'd like, it's certainly fine enough. The next point I had to consider was how to attach the chess pieces. I originally wanted them to be a third layer on the same corrugated plastic but it was far too hard to work with for anything requiring even a modest level of detail. I printed the art on label paper and put it on a pizza box which was made of relatively thin cardboard but this didn't work very well either and was going to also put paper into the equation.
In the end, I decided to settle for printing the pieces on photo paper, cutting each piece out with an Xacto-knife and laminating them. I figure the lamination will keep the paper from being affected by the humidity and make them shiny so they will fit the shiny painted look of the board. Laminating also tends to make the pictures look sharper and crisper. The main drawback is that the pieces are nearly flat and I had hoped for a third raised layer.
Cutting out and laminating all the pieces was time-consuming and, again, my results were far from perfect though only close scrutiny is likely to reveal the imperfections. I noted with irony that the pawns, which were easiest to draw in Illustrator, were the hardest to cut out and attach to the board because of their narrow, curvy shape and there were more of them than any other piece. I had to cut down the double-sided tape several times to get it to fit on the pawns but finally got all the pieces attached.
In order to make the edge look more finished, I trimmed it with heavy foil tape. I'm not sure what the original purpose of this type of tape is supposed to be but it is literally very stiff foil which is sticky on one side. It was very hard to work with and didn't go on nearly as well as I'd hoped (there are crinkles in it as one would expect in foil). If I could do it over again, I'd use some other type of silver tape which wasn't as prone to wrinkling but I can't rip this stuff off and do it again because I'm sure it'll tear off the paint in strips. Nonetheless, I think it looks better with the tape than it would without it and looks quite nice up on the wall next to the Monty Python poster.
When you buy bottles of Coke or Pepsi in Japan, it's not uncommon to find plastic packets attached to the top with little bits of various types of junk in them. Often these items are trinkets to dangle off your cell phone or "collectible" items following a certain theme such as small plastic figures of Snoopy or the characters from the animated series Lupin III. Quite some time ago, I was even compelled to collect a series of small (very cute) Christmas ornaments of the Coca-Cola polar bears (I still have them in the closet in a Christmas tin). Most of these items are decorative and completely impractical though you'll occasionally get something of extremely limited use such as a magnet or a clip.
Since Coke Zero was only introduced to Japan relatively recently, 1.5 liter bottles of that beverage sometimes have these little bar magnets hung around their necks. If you click and look at a bigger version, you can see the left end of the magnet is a little Coke bottle shaped "window" to the back of the bar.
Today, I bought a 1.5 liter bottle of Diet Pepsi with a Bugs Bunny packet attached to the top. I didn't pay much attention to what it was since I was mainly picking it up because it was cheap. From the appearance, I thought it might be a little calendar or stickers. When I opened it up, I saw it was full of little papers. Before reading the Japanese, I thought they might be for cleaning your eyeglasses though that did seem like a rather peculiar thing to attach to a bottle of soda.
When I looked more closely, the package said "aburatorigami" on it. The rough translation of this is "oil taking paper". I remembered then that I'd seen these types of papers before in the hands of the office ladies at my former job. They rubbed them on their faces on occasion to remove oil from their skin. Supposedly, these are effective in removing sebum in such a way that make-up applied after a mop up with these papers is less likely to crack or deteriorate throughout the day. However, since I often saw women using them in midday, they may be commonly used for all-purpose oil removal.
Given that this is an item used to conduct what could be considered personal hygiene maintenance, it seemed an even stranger thing to be attaching to the neck of soda bottle than eyeglass cleaning papers. While doing a little research on this type of item, I did discover that they are distributed with company messages, logos, or advertising much like matchbooks in the U.S. or pocket tissue packets on the streets of Tokyo. There's a web site which seems to specialize in producing these papers for companies to give away to prospective customers. It seems that they are appropriate for all types of businesses from dentists to lacquerware makers to beauty salons.
The bottom line for a company that chooses to distribute these papers does not appear to be how appropriate they seem to be with the type of product they're given away with (like soda pop) but appears to be their desirability and usefulness to nearly anyone who gets them. Much like pocket tissue packets, they seem to be the sort of thing most people wouldn't mind having handy. Well, everyone except me. Mine are headed for the trash bin.
There are a great many blogs and sites that I follow which provide advice for improving your quality of life in one way or another. I really should add a section for links to such sites but I wanted to take a moment to recommend a couple which I've found particularly interesting and enjoyable.
Lifehacker provides tips and links to sites with tips about many aspects of life including using your computer, changing your living space so it is more attractive and efficient, making your own versions of things more cheaply, saving money and time and reducing consumption. I don't find every tip useful and tend to skim the headers for each one and generally find one of use or interest several times a week. The comments on Lifehacker often add even more to the tips and provide a lot of information as well.
The nice thing is that the tips are useful to those of us living in Japan for the most part and not specifically geared toward people in any particular life situation. I strongly recommend bookmarking it and giving it a glance on a daily basis.
While Lifehacker is mainly concerned with improving your external life, Lifehack is concerned with both improving your outer and inner life (but not in a spiritually-oriented way so please don't think it's a religious site). There is an absolutely excellent post there on "10 virtually instant ways to improve your life" which every person ought to be forced to read again and again until they act in accord with those ideas and teach them to their children, friends, coworkers, and pets. Honestly, the world would be a happier place if everyone followed those steps (or at least tried to do so).
As with Lifehacker, I don't find everything useful but I give the headings a read everyday and find several really good items a week. The links to tips for using vinegar are particularly interesting this week.
Click this picture to see detail.
