Ha!

Good! I think McCain just threw away his chance at the presidency with his VP candidate choice. After all those ads about Obama's lack of experience and "is he ready to lead?" messages, McCain choses a running mate whose experience in governing consists of one term serving as mayor of a town in Alaska and less than two years serving as that state's governor? That's who he is putting in place to be "a heartbeat" from the presidency when one of the largest issues surrounding his candidacy is his age and whether or not he'll be around to even serve out a full term? Wtf were he and his handlers thinking?
I think the choice of Palin is such blatant pandering by the Republican Party to "the female vote." One 30-second look at Palin's stand on the issues will convince any voter that she is a far cry from Hillary Clinton's positions on the issues and women will not now be suddenly, magically flocking to support McCain because he chose a "hockey mom" with a husband who races snowmobiles as his running mate. Is this supposed to offset the elitism of McCain not even knowing how many homes he owns?
I think he's blown it. My dad, sister and I were all in the car on the way to lunch during Palin's speech and my dad even said he wouldn't be voting for McCain now. Most of the time he's a pretty pro-establishment guy (my Dad), and if he is turned off by this decision, I'm sure many other are as well. And I don't think it will convince anyone who was already on the fence about choosing McCain over Obama, to swing in McCain's direction.

Jia You!

James Fallows is now posted to Beijing and is blogging about the Olympics.
Nice to read some coverage of the games from someone who's there, understands the place and is not pushing any particular government's agenda. He has always been one of my favorite journalists.

A Reasonable Likeness?

Found this cool site and made my own avatar. (It's over there on the right ---> )
I guess it kind of looks like me. I have a hard time understanding what I look like since there aren't any particularly distinctive features to my face. About all I can say about it is that it's a long oval.
My hair is a little shorter than this. The only choice that matched my length had wavy hair, and mine is not wavy. (Not without serious coaxing anyway.)
Suppose anyone who reads this and knows me could comment as to whether it looks anything like me.

Ew!

The supermarket I frequent has a sign outside the entrance touting their brown rice sushi. I don't think I've ever bought their supermarket sushi, but I have seen the Asian dude (have no idea of his actual ethnicity beyond that) behind the sushi counter near the deli. Today that particular corner of the market was unmanned and instead I witnessed some tall, dirty looking guy in a red t-shirt and jeans open up one of the packages of sushi, scoop out all the gari (pickled ginger) from that box and then put it into the box he was buying.
It was so disgusting. And I could smell the ginger from several feet away.

And I'm Not Going to Spend $48 for One That Just Sort of Fits

I went bra shopping today. Why it takes 2.5 hours, three stores and about three dozen different styles tried on to end up with two bras that kind of fit okay is beyond my comprehension. I'm really not that oddly shaped.

Wiiiii!!!!!

We got a Wii recently. It's a blast.
We got the Wii Fit yesterday. It's crazy fun.
(It's also pretty nice that the scale shows everyone's weight to be way less than it actually is.)
I'm working on a translation job that will keep me busy for the next several days and the Wii Fit is proving to be the perfect break activity. It gets my muscles stretched and my blood flowing a little. That must be better for my concentration than my usual break activity, which tends to be ... reading.

日本語でどうぞ

今日は別にたいしたできごとはなかったが、ランゲージ・ウィークだから、英語以外な言葉で書いたほうがいいかなと思って。。。
ウィークと言えば、今週ウィーが家にやってきました。けっこう楽しい。今のところウィースポーツしか持っていないけど、Miiを作ったり、見たりするのも面白い。私のMiiはPamiiと名付けた。やっぱりウィーフィットもほしいな。でも、手に入りにくいです。
めちゃつまらないプログを書いて、すまんな。でもここを頻繁に見てくれている人の内に２−３人くらいしか読めないんちゃうかな。

Note: I was going to try to do a show/hide or expandable summary of this post but figuring out CSS and all that is more of a pain than writing in a foreign language. Maybe I'll just post the translation in English in white text that you can select to read.

Nothing particularly special happened today, but since it's Language Week I figure I should post in a language other than English.
Speaking of "week", we got a Wii this week. It's pretty fun. We only have Wii Sports right now, but it's also fun to make Miis or see othe people's Miis. I really want a Wii Fit, but they're hard to get a hold of.
Sorry for writing such a lame blog post. But I bet out of the people who come to this blog regularly only 2 or 3 even read Japanese.

I Survived A Fake Japanese Game Show

We're watching "I Survived a Japanese Game Show" right now. While it's awfully cool to be hearing Japanese come out of my TV on a network channel here in New Hampshire, so far the show seems kind of lame.
I read somewhere that it's not an actual Japanese game show, but a game show put together by ABC that was filmed in Japan with a Japanese host who is based in L.A. So it's more "faux reality".
I'm finding the fake over-reactions of the host and the Japanese audience annoying. But then again, mochi has finally made it to American prime time.
Mostly I'm bracing myself for all the questions I'm going to have to answer from my newbie students in the fall about stupid crap from this show.