diary
 articles
 photos
 engrish
 m.i.
 kats
 links
 archive




It happened in...

March





What she's done to my brain

THURS 29 MARCH

Here's a conversation I had with my wife this afternoon. Word for word.

She: Can you make some [muffled word] tea?
Me: Peach, did you say?
She: No. PG! If I'd wanted peach I would have said apple.

And not only is that true, but I also understood what she meant. Save me now.


Red Cross Parcel

THURS 29 MARCH


Just look at that, would you

I haven't got any bread! Must have bread! Must make toast!


Tony vs. Lauren

THURS 29 MARCH



What the internet was made for

THURS 29 MARCH

This one's for those of us who have an incredibly short attention span and like our comedy puerile.

There is of course the inimitable Cute Overload, which is like your child in those angelic moments. Now, like your child in those 'too many orange Smarties' moments, there is I can has Cheezburger?

Instant favourite.


Shine yer shoes, guvnah?

MON 19 MARCH

Miklos Fejer is an English teacher down in Miyakonojo, in Miyazaki prefecture, our neighbouring prefecture to the south east.

This is how his kindergarten class concludes, with him asking the kids how the lesson was. "Shock & Awe!" they reply. "Who's the man?" he asks. "You the man, Miklos!" they reply. But wait till the end...




World Cup

SUN 18 MARCH

It's all going off at the cricket World Cup.

England players getting reprimanded all over the place for being naughty boys, culminating in Andrew Flintoff being dropped for the Canada game after a late-night pedalo-sinking incident, and being stripped of the vice captaincy. You couldn't make it up.

And here I am filling in my World Cup wallchart to see that after two games, Ireland are unbeaten. Who on earth would have predicted that after their fine tie against Zimbabwe they would beat Pakistan and send them home? Certainly not the promoters and TV execs for whom it's a nightmare come true. And it just got better when Bangladesh proceeded to beat India. Bangladesh also now look a pretty good bet for the Super Eight stage. Great stuff.


'Door finally closed

SAT 17 MARCH

After more than a year of legal proceedings, Takafumi Horie, the former CEO of Livedoor, was finally sentenced on yesterday.

He had been charged, lest you forget, with "falsely reporting 5.3 billion yen in profits" and "releasing false information during an attempted takeover of a publishing company by a Livedoor-affiliated company in October 2004. The affiliated company was described as recording profits when in fact it suffered losses."

He was sentenced to two and a half years, though the prosecution had been angling for four. In my opinion, any pretence that this was simply the prosecution of a wrongdoer was finally blown away by the fact that there was no suspension of the sentence as is usual in this kind of case.

When the authorities announced his arrest as part of a 'drive against business corruption', the naive amongst us awaited the long list of arrests to follow. Which never came. Either corruption was not so prevalent in Japanese business (ahem) or Horie was being taken down not so much for what he did, but more for the way he did it, for who he was and for what he represented.

This, coupled with his unrepentant, combative attitude, has contributed to the unsuspended sentence, I'm sure.

Unsurprisingly, he intends to appeal. Irrespective of that, the example has now been set. You do things according to the established order (that's not to say 'play by the rules', as that's not the same thing at all), or you'll be set upon.

I'm not saying that he doesn't deserve what he got. What I'm saying is if you're really interested in punishing the crime, then Livedoor can only be the tip of a sizeable iceberg. To leave the rest of it alone is a far larger crime.

Incidentally, pending his appeal, he's been released on bail (¥500 million / £2.2 million). Which seems rather odd to me. Whether that's normal or not, it seems inconsistent that a man who's yet to be proven guilty can be held in custody for months without access to legal representation or family contact, and yet someone who's just been ajudged guilty is released on bail. Just one more oddity of the legal system.


It's not me who needs saving, dear

WEDS 14 MARCH

## That's me on the doorstep / That's me in the porch-light / Selling my religion ##
Remember 'Care in the Community' - turfing folks out of the mental hospitals onto the streets? When spring came around, there were people gibbering in bus-stops, screaming at trees and generally making a nuisance of themselves. It's become a pretty good barometer for the change of the seasons.

It's no different here. london.net's had its springtime visits from some decidely odd coves who make no sense, while at home, of course, we're under no obligation to answer the door.

And so by some cosmic irony, today Jehovah's Witnesses have descended on Mashiki like a biblical plague. And aside from the obvious, they don't appear normal. No, instead they seem to be the results of some strange religious cloning experiment (in retrospect, the word 'strange' might be a bit redundant there). On a large scale. Eerily, they move around the streets in identical pairs (## The animals went in 2 by 2, Hoorah, Hoorah... ##) - same comfy black shoes, same heavy black coat, same floppy hat (though here there are concessions to colour, they still remind me of beetles). The only difference being that one of each (and every) pair wears a surgical mask, while the other, obviously the 'speaker', doesn't.

They're all middle-aged ladies with nothing better to be doing at 10 in the morning, so obviously aren't gainfully employed. Bless them, they're bored. So they've joined a little club with like-'minded' bods so they can spend the occasional morning doing what obaachan do best - accosting innocent people and meddling. It's almost like the religion was made for them.


Ain't as easy as it used to be

MON 12 MARCH

People who are not studying Japanese tend to fall largely into two groups. There are those who have some notion of learning being a soft-focus romantic endeavour, filled with artistic brushstrokes, cherry blossom and bamboo.

Then there's the other group, let's call it the 'biang' group, for whom the very idea of trying to commit seemingly random strokes to memory ranges somewhere between baffling and terrifying.

Yes, I've been turning up the heat in my kanji-learning. Any illusions you might begin with, that you'll "start with the easy ones", are quickly dispelled. The very few easy ones (honestly, these are the easy ones) soon give way to... all the rest. And all the rest means many thousand.

Recognising them, of course, is a completely different game from writing them from memory. If I had a multiple choice test on the first 200, I'd probably get all of them. If I had a blank piece of paper, however, I could write perhaps 20 of them perfectly. Hence I've been hitting the books.

So once you've mastered that, there's that other great game - remembering the numerous pronunciations of each one. If the kanji that you're staring blankly at has only two wildly differing pronunciations, then you've got off lightly. Most have more of course. But when you come across those rare gems that have only one pronunciation, it's enough to make you weep hot tears of joy.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I must return to my tear-stained text-books.


Away Goals

WEDS 07 MARCH

Liverpool 0 Barcelona 1 (2-2 agg)
Bless the Away Goals rule. It certainly made getting up at 4.30am worthwhile. Bit nervy, that second half though. There I sat, in a dark, cold living room, squinting at a 4 inch by 3 inch square of video on the internet, blood pressure up to 11. Ah how I enjoy Liverpool's Champions League games. And so to the quarter-finals. Where we'll meet Chelsea. Mark my words. Any money.


On hiatus

TUES 06 MARCH

Newsround's been ticking over, but it's been a bit light in the diary. That's because there's simply been nothing of any note to tell. Which seems par for the course for the time of year.

It's a peculiar time. We're burning the paraffin like mad tonight, it hardly made it above 10° today, and Mrs C's curled up on the heated carpet under a blanket (mind you, she's a bit of a drama queen - I'm quite comfortable in my thick sweater. And two t-shirts). Yet on Sunday we basked in a record 26° and I collected a sun tan!

london.net continues to go from strength to strength, with the shop breaking monthly records and the school reaching and surpassing targets we set when we started, we're both being kept fairly busy.

So work is all we have going on. On TV as I type this is the World Champion of Kicking Himself in the Head (an American called JB Destiny, and the record's 42 times in one minute). I really need the winter to end soon.


3 years

MON 05 MARCH

Goodness, today's my 3rd wedding anniversary. While we both agree that that time has flown, it's also as if it's always been like this.

I think, if anything, this proves a rather worrying weakness in the human brain. If it can't even keep a reliable grip on a concept as basic as time...





Back to February?