scribbles

Hmm, Should I Teach for JET too?

Andy was recently reading about a English Teacher in Japan who got grabbed in the nuts by middle schoolers:

Ok. So anyway, the whole "black men have big dicks" stereotype stretches far and wide, even to the nation's 12 year olds. Part of why I'm here is not just to kind of sort of help teach English, but to "broaden cultural perceptions". Break stereotypes, challenge preconcieved notions, all that jazz. That's good and all, but this is one stereotype I think I'm just gonna let slide.

So anyway, I get asked "bigu dikku" A LOT. Every 2-3 days in fact, which is amazing considering I got asked this question about 2-3 times *in my entire life* in America. Locker room jokes aside. How do you answer that anyway? To a 12-15 year old? I wave them off and say "No no no." Then they say "Oh, sumaru dikku?" (trans. "Small dick?") and OF COURSE that's wrong so I have to correct them. It's just a no-win stiuation.

On the days I'm avoiding them asking me that, I'm avoiding them actually trying to grab it. I shit you not, I have to play Dodgedick with Japanese Jr. High kids on a weekly basis. Boys and girls! Age, gender, doesn't matter, they all want a stab at it. The boys are actually more persistant though. I had one boy grab for it, and when I said "No!" he put his hands together and, in English, said "Please!" Oh hell no. I was sitting next to a 12-year old boy who kept grabbing at it, and when I told him "No!" he asked "Why not?" I wondered if there weren't some cultural bounds I wasn't understsanding, so I said clearly "age 10 years and become female since birth, then we'll talk." His solution was to ask the girl sitting next to him to trade seats, grab my dick, and tell him about it.

That is so NOT what I meant.

Ah, Japan Japan Japan.

Naughty Naughty Boy

From a mass e-mail from the cousin, Marisa Louie:

Hi everyone:

It's with a lot of relief and a lot of anger that I send this message along to you. My good friend and former Santa Cruz housemate Jay Vigilla, upon moving to San Diego earlier this year, was assaulted and swindled by an individual who had arranged housing for him in the area. Jay has pursued police and legal avenues to retrieve his down payment, to no avail.

As Jay's friends, we could only listen in frustration as word of what happened to him was quietly passed along. Now that Jay has finally decided to come public, I feel that it's my responsibility as a friend to honor his request and send his message through my networks. If it compels you, please forward this to those you know.

Please take the time to read Jay's original message, pasted below.

Thanks,

Marisa

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Hello everyone,

I apologize for abusing everyone's email addresses but this is honestly a personal plea.

I would like you all to know that I have had a very unfavorable interaction with the President of J Global Entertainment. In short, I was supposed to move in with him when first moving to San Diego. Before moving in, he had gotten me drunk and sexually assaulted me. He had admitted doing the same to others. I told him I could not live with him and he had promised me a refund of my deposit and rent back in mid January. To this day he still has not refunded the money to me even though I had received many proposed dates of repayment. He has unfavorable business practices and is not an honest or honorable man.

In this email I am asking you to please not attend any concerts or use any services provided from J Global Entertainment. This is the company owned and run by my attacker. His concert venues are mostly in the Southern California Area as well as Las Vegas.

Please forward this message to as many people as you know. I would like the message to get out as far as it can go. People that are so willing to take advantage of others should not be supported.

Thank you for taking the time to read and forward this message. It means a great deal to me.

Jay Vigilla

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Marisa Louie

Funky Fish Fraud

Lisa Takeuchi, friend from SFSU and soon-to-be foreign exchange student at Waseda University in Tokyo, sent me an email with pictures with the following subject:

FW: WOW! : Phuket Deep Sea Creatures - Found At Seaside After TSUNAMI .. ..

I was shocked and awed, and then I googled for "Phuket Deep Sea Creatures" and found out it was a phony. Not that the pictures are fake, but that they didn't get un-oceaned by the fatal Tsunami.

Still cool that there are these creatures out there, though, especially the freaky jaw monster.

Everybody and Their Cat

My cousin, Marisa Louie, is on the Intarnet.

Kind of late, but she was in the news [bastard registration required] a while back too.

Tutor Man Gives Congrats

Happy Birthday, Carol!

Jerry Pietrzak, Bryan Butterfield, Hiroko Horii, and Carol Marshall all have birthdays this month within the span of two weeks.

Boy, people sure like to have lots of sex in July and August.

I Didn't Know They Had Those Numbers Online

Big Rick went on a rant about his former radio residency (if he won't say it, I will: Live105) and pointed to statistics. Top of the charts? News/Talk, Adult Contemporary, News, Classical... A pattern? When I was carpooling to work/school everyday from the East Bay, these were the stations people were listening to. It was like they were the "safe" stations to listen to while you had a complete stranger riding with you in the car for a non-negligible amount of time. Although, I broke this unspoken rule many-a-time by popping in some blues, rock, or even sometimes electronic.

I wonder if carpooling has some kind of impact on these numbers.

Hit Stuff With Sticks

Emy, fellow classmate from SFSU (she's the one on the second from the right kind of drumming non-chalantly) was performing with her brotha's and sista's from the San Francisco Taiko Dojo last weekend at the peace plaza in the Cherry Blossom Festival here in SF. They also performed in their Taiko Festival that day, which I couldn't attend since I was at the crazy madness at Jerry's.

I love Taiko, though, and Emy described it once to me how it's a very spiritual experience for her. I believe it. From the dojo's website:

According to Grand Master Tanaka, physical strength and stamina are critical, and his students are put through a disciplined and strict physical regimen, in addition to hours of pounding on drums. Yet, he also stresses that it takes more than physical strength to make the drums thunder. "Big muscles can produce a big sound," he said, "But the quality of the sound comes from inside—a flow from the performer to the drum, or Ki. To Grand Master Tanaka, the ultimate challenge is reaching the point of unity of drummer"s spirit with the drum.

Very cool awesome indeed.

SrPersist Makefile for OSX

Since I know there are so many of you Scheme programmers out there, I've provided a Makefile for OSX for the SrPersist Scheme bindings for ODBC.

So, if you've been trying to compile SrPersist (oh, I know you've wanted to, you sly dog you), then now you can do it without fidgetting too much. Here's how:

1. Download my sexy Makefile.OSX.
2. Copy the file to where the source for SrPersist is installed. Mine is in: /Applications/PLT Scheme v209/src/srpersist
3. Backup the old Makefile, if you'd like.
4. Do this: mv Makefile.OSX Makefile
5. Then this: make
6. Then this: make install
7. Use your sexy new bindings (I haven't figured this out part yet myself)

Hope that helps.

I want to use mysqlclient.ss instead, that is, if I can figure out what a c-pointer is.

On a side note, Danny Yoo of SPC lore is still alive, and he's posted on the PLT Scheme Mailing List. Good lord.

VoIP + Japanese + Flexibility

I applied for this job at Brekeke. I wanna work with VoIP; sounds totally cool, and I get to speak Japanese. How incredibly delicious is that?

Help Japan Make Babies

Mainichi News reports that 1 in 3 Japanese married couples are sexless. No, that doesn't mean that they're asexual; it means that they don't have sex, you silly.

At 44 percent, nearly half the sexless respondents said they felt dealing with the opposite sex was a bother, well above the 31 percent of sexually active people who believed the same.

Sheesh, it's no wonder why the Japanese birthrate is on a steady downhill tumble to childless oblivion.

Unless women here start having more babies, the population in Japan is expected to shrink more than 20% by the middle of this century. Nearly half would be elderly, placing impossible burdens on the health and pension systems.

日本語でも読める。可哀そうと思う。しかも、日本が赤ちゃん作らなければ将来に若者がいなくて老人ばかりのが嫌だ！

He Ain't Lackin' In Years!

Jerry's Birthday Party was a smash hit, and we took plenty of pretty pictures and slapped'em on the Kanji Bushi site.

Happy Birthday, Jerr-o!

Who's That Sexy Fellow?

Last Friday was Montage at Club Six, and I got my picture taken ten seconds after walking through the doors, and the shot was put on a gallery online.

The Other David Patter

I was doing research for work on how to access the D3 Pick database from PHP when I found a tutorial by David Patterson. Wait, that ain't the David Patterson that I know!

Suspense With Frivolous Flying Sheep?

So, the trailer for The Interpreter has another one of those cliche lines: "pure unadulterated suspense." Will someone tell me what might be adulterated suspense?

Can We Shoot Deer Too?

Weather's getting less Seattle-ish and more LA-ish. Thinking of going camping with friends at Chabot in Oakland. They've even got a place to shoot shit.

Blues at the Roadhouse

Doc's pointing got me to the Roadhouse (the finest blues you've never heard). Currently listening to Terry Wall & The Wallbangers on Tony Steidler-Dennison's latest Roadhouse podcast.

Very Cool.

Hao Nei Ma?

From cogsci on LiveJournal: Is it possible to be dyslexic in Chinese?

Chinese has no letters (one ideogram = one syllable = one concept); therefore, you can't be dyslexic in Chinese, right? No such luck. While it's true that letter reversal is common in English-speaking dyslexics, the term refers to any reading disability, and the Chinese have their share of folks who struggle to make sense of the written word.

The article goes on, with talk on research by Bryan Butterworth and Joey Tang:

Dyslexia is the same for everyone, and affects "phonemic analysis"--the ability to convert letters into sounds, which the reader then assembles into syllables, words, sentences, etc. [...] Butterworth and Tang suggest that the dyslexia = sucks-at-phonemic-analysis theory also explains why there are fewer Chinese dyslexics: phonemic analysis is an extra step for which Chinese readers have less need.

(links added by moi)

Wait, but from what I know about speed-reading, you shouldn't have to "read in your head" in order to understand what a text is saying. That is, the letters don't have to be converted into sounds for the words/sentences to have meanings. Hmmm...

Sega Fantasy VI

Craisin sent me a link to Sega Fantasy VI. Long flash movie that's worth it, especially if you're a gamer.

If you can't read Japanese, under the flash movie, it says:

"You'll laugh and you'll cry to this, the 'Final' Fantasy."

日本のブロッグ

Whenever I see a Japanese website/blog pop up on lists like Technorati, I just wonder: who are these people who put funny icons on their blog posts, and is it a coincidence that they've got "mama" in their names?

One of them (as expected from Japanese) photo up on food to accompany posts.

Shine on, you bright star

Rocco was mentioning his other asian friend from Oakland and how he speaks like a black dude.

"Ivan, why don't you talk like that, huh? I saw your yearbook, and your school wasn't necessarily Colorado."

"Well, I was like the bright shining yellow star in the dark black night."

Man, I hope that didn't sound racist.

I have come to bring the Sword!

My roommate is a fan of a director named Luis Buñuel. La Voie lactée (The Milky Way) was rented tonight, and I half-watched along the way. A few noteworthy scenes:

1. A group of cute elementary school girls reciting different ways to get condemned. 2. A man, audience to the cute elementary school girls reciting different ways to get condemned imaging the pope being assasinated (excuse the bad timing!). 3. A religious group in the forest, with the head preacher saying "the soul is the more pure; the body is the most filthy. the soul was created by God; the body was created by the devil. we must desecrate the body to make the soul more pure" and they then proceed to have an orgy. 4. The last scene has Jesus saying "I have not come to bring salvation; I have come to bring the sword! Sons, kill your fathers! Son, slay the sword upon your fathers!"

This same director was exiled from Spain and France.

Immortality

I've been re-reading Immortality recently. For being the book that changed my life six (maybe seven?) years ago, it still packs a punch in my emotions.

Maybe it'll change my world again.