Yesterday, I spent the day monkeying around on a boat and learning all sorts of strange new words: ラダー, ジャイブする, タクする…
Today, there’s an ojiisan (loudly) demonstrating the use of Japanese semaphore flags to a dozen people standing in the middle of the small backstreet behind my house (many, many kilometers away from the closest navigable body of water)…
Music legend, proto-rapper1Even though he wasn’t crazy about the title. and black poet Gil Scott-Heron has passed yesterday at the age of 62.
His slam on 70s society was so powerful as to give us one of today’s most ubiquitous journalistic clichés. He was a sharp political analyst, tireless militant for civil rights and the inspiration to a surprisingly wide spectrum of artists.
I was rarely so disappointed as when I read of his arrest in 2001 and ensuing decade of drug problems. Having sung for most of his career about the ravage of widespread drug-abuse in inner-city communities, seeing him eventually fall into the ugly trap of crack-cocaine felt like a personal betrayal.
Despite (or perhaps because of) all that, his last album, released only a couple months ago, was one of his most powerful. It will probably be one of the best album released in 2011 by any artist, dead or alive.
RIP Gil Scott-Heron
The point where my enjoyment turns to visceral hatred along some of Coltrane’s tracks, could be measured down to the exact second.
A very nifty trick I discovered while working on making KanjiBox accessible to blind users.
I previously mused that an iPhone/iPod made a much better and more cost-efficient language-studying tool than any dedicated electronic gizmo out there. This is now a thousand times truer…
One of the coolest features brought by version 4 of iOS (the software that runs on all iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch) is also one of the least known and used: VoiceOver is a built-in screen-reader geared at making Apple devices accessible to blind and visually impaired users. If you are such a user, you know about it already and will learn nothing here. For everyone else, this feature still has much to offer!
VoiceOver supports a dizzying collection of languages: from English to Japanese, Mandarin and Cantonese, most European languages, hell, even regional accents (English comes in US-, Brit- and Aussie-accented variants… Canadian-French as well). While the quality for English is about what you would expect from late-90s speech synthesis, the quality of some other languages is vastly superior. This is particularly true of the Japanese and French voices. To my very limited ear, Mandarin and Mexican-Spannish also sound quite close to human quality (Spain-Spanish, on the other hand, is pretty robotic).
As it turns out, your iPhone (/iPad/iPod Touch) comes with a native pronunciation teacher, out of the box. For hard-to-read languages like Japanese or Chinese, it can be a life-saver: helping you decipher SMS, emails or web pages, instead of relying on clunky, time-consuming, copy-pasting to a dictionary app.
Below are detailed instructions on how to enable VoiceOver and use it to read any text in any language on your iPhone (setup should be near-identical for iPads and iPod Touchs):
DaveCorp Gardening International, has announced the diversification of their portfolio. Keeping their recent investments in CTRO, MINT and BSIL, and staking new positions in A.MINT, L.GRAS and L.BSIL…
Market analysts are very optimistic on the Summer prospects of DaveCorp Gardening International and predict a bullish market on delicious Thai curries and fresh mojitos1The real kind, using apple mint & spearmint, not that poor ersatz some people make with peppermint..
It is quite hard finding free-access wifi anywhere in Japan, let alone access that does not require you to sit and purchase a drink (most often at such exciting local eateries as McDonald’s or Starbucks)…
Which is why I figured I’d commit this tidbit of info to Google (and the occasional Kyoto-bound reader of this blog):
I just noticed some new banners have been put up along Shijo dori, announcing free wifi in the street. This is apparently courtesy of the neighbourhood’s shopkeeper association. Only small catch is that the wifi is password-protected1I have no doubt there is a suitably pointless bureaucratic reason for that.… and nobody seems to have realised that the primary target for such an offer (foreign tourists without 3G cell phones and limitless data plans) might have a hard time reading the katakana spelling of “password” on the banners. Ahem.
Anyway, the free wifi network info are:
Access point: shijo-0123456789
Password: 0123456789
Time to finally change topics a little…
As part of my grand OCD project to document every last tiny aspect of my activities (and possibly do something cool with the data one day), I have started compiling a List of Movies I watched, with ratings and mini-reviews.
At the moment, it is limited to recent viewings, plus the content of my permanent movie library and a couple random ones. Over time, I will try to commit more, as they come back to me.
“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals”…
The most annoying part about trying to hold any Fukushima-related conversation over the past couple weeks: being made to feel like a tireless cheerleader for TEPCO, the Japanese government or nuclear energy in general. Merely refusing the whole panicky, guts-over-science, interpretation of events automatically left me in that corner over there, with the energy company shills, neo-con climate change deniers and simple-minded fools doomed to die a fiery nuclear death.
This is particularly enraging, if somewhat ironic, considering how much I loathe practically every aspects of public policy-making in Japan. In usual times, I am the culturally-insensitive boorish gaijin who snidely comments on the levels of inertia, corruption and inefficiency ingrained in Japan’s particular brand of bureaucratic para-democracy, getting much awkward silence and polite placating from annoyed Japanese counterparts (yes, I am the life of parties).
So, let me spell it out for the dialectically-challenged out there: Fuck TEPCO. Fuck its useless bunch of amakudari, working hand-in-hand with their equally self-serving ministry bureaucrat friends to keep their cushy retirement gigs at the expense of pretty much everything else. They are a perfect (though far from unique) embodiment of everything that is wrong with Japanese politics and bureaucracy. And most of it has absolutely nothing to do with the uncontrollable consequences of one of the strongest natural disaster to ever hit a modern country. If you want to blame TEPCO for something, why don’t you start by going back to 1995 and have a look at their practice of hiring Japanese lower-class burakumin to work in sub-standard conditions…
While I am at it: let me also publicly state my fervent dislike of nuclear radiations, tsunamis, cancer, war, famine and innocent children’s tears.
That being said…
How about first revisiting those heady days of post-tsunami events and the journalistic gold-rush for fear-mongering, grossly-inaccurate, paper-selling nuggets of gold. Remember? When “Western media had a better grasp of the situation than you people on the ground”1True quote from some well-meaning moron to whom I was trying to impress that Japan was not the devastated radioactive wasteland he envisioned.. The somewhat condescending idea that foreign media gave an inherently better coverage of the news, by virtue of their independence and superior journalistic skills…
Here is the deal about foreign media and what they publish(ed) about Fukushima: their facts all come from one place. The very same place Japanese media get their facts from, the same place everybody gets their facts from: official TEPCO press releases and Japanese government spokesmen. CNN does not have some embedded journalist traipsing around reactor #3 with a geiger counter or a mole inside the DPJ headquarters: they do like everybody else and work from [poorly translated, second-hand-acquired] official news releases. So much for the “poorly informed” local media, kept in the dark while their foreign homologues expose the naked shocking truth to the world. Their only differences resided in their tone and the quality of their analysis. And on both counts, the less said, the better.
Rarely used words and neologisms abound in recent Japanese news…
More than the news-fabricated fly-jin “trend”, my favourite Japanese phrase these days is 疑心暗鬼:
An idiom whose components literally translate to “fear – darkness – demons”, beautifully rendered by the Green Goddess into: “Fear peoples the darkness with monsters”…
In everyday conversation, it can be used as a synonym for “paranoia”.