Other skills...

That last post really wasn't so good. There were kind of a lot of different ideas rattling around in my head, and I don't think I was able to express any of them as well as I would have liked. In summary, I am not nearly as satisfied with this course as I would like to be, and last Wednesday was repeatedly unsatisfactory in a number of different ways.
However, one thing that did come up in the writing class last week was a point about Japanese language. Another guy in my class happens to have spent a couple of months working for a Japanese company, and even got to spend a couple of weeks in Tokyo for a job. So he wrote a short piece that involved a person trying to negotiate with a person speaking broken English with a heavy Japanese accent. One of the verbal tics he gave the Japanese character, in addition to the whole L/R thing, was the interjection of the syllable "ka". As in "you are funny person-ka." So when the lady who was ostensibly running the workshop asked what that meant I was volunteered by the author to give an explanation.

"'Ka" is generally a sentence final particle indicating a question. In this case he's using it to elicit assent from the listener, much the same as 'y'know?' in casual English."

As I said last time, the lady running the workshop really didn't demonstrate much in the way of listening skills, so she had to ask me to repeat myself. I spent four years as a grammar teacher, and one of my strong points was explaining stuff like that. It was my job to be able to answer those questions. Go ahead, try me. What is the function of a subjunctive verb? How do I use a semicolon? When is it okay to use "alright" in a sentence?

The subjunctive is used to indicate an action that is not presently true, as in a wish, desire, command for action to be taken in future, or a hypothetical situation. The semicolon is used to link a subordinate, explanatory or elucidative clause to an independent clause, or to separate a list of comma-heavy clauses. And you should not bother using "alright"; you should either use "all right" or else re-write your sentence and use something else.

But I digress. She seemed somewhat surprised at my rattling that off without much in the way of warning, and I was somewhat surprised at her needing the explanation twice. So yes, I could summarize the general use of "ka", but I declined to point out that he actually should have used the conversational question marker "ne" instead.
But lest you think that I have a higher level of competency in another language than I really do, I oughta come clean and admit I've tried, on and off, to post stuff in Japanese too. There are, no doubt, numerous mistakes. Proving once again that those who can't do, teach.

A schoolboy's heart no longer beats within this chest...

I told you all I went back to school, right? It hasn't been all smooth.

Can you imagine what kind of situation I must be in to have to say something like "Dammit, is there reason I'm not getting more homework at this point"? Or "why the crap didn't they give us a reading list?" Or even "I'm pissed off because my damn dumbass teachers aren't working us hard enough, crap damn hell piss fart double dookey damn it!"

That's right. Today, in trying to explain my interests as a writer, I needed to clear up the differences between comic books and comic strips as regards the ways in which they are written, published and distributed to a person who was only theoretically aware of any differences at all between something like Dilbert and something else like V for Vendetta. So not only did she immediately judge me based on her own blinkered world-view, but after asking for an explanation, she demonstrated that she was not listening at all.

"Yeah, so when you talk about telling stories with pictures, I mean, I love Garfield, so that's great that you're thinking about coming up with skits for that."

To add ignorance to insult to injury, our so-called Professional Writing course assignment was to come up with a lesson plan to teach an aspect of creative writing. Now, this was done for a teacher who has a side career in... teaching creative writing seminars. Is there any reason not to think that she just scammed, like 15 free lesson plans for her own damn business? The only up side I can think of is that so many of my classmates have stopped giving a damn that the lessons they submitted were likely to be a load of crap anyway.

Oh yeah, final indignity of the day. In trying to talk about science fiction fandom to a self-proclaimed "sci-fi dork", I tried to ask about a series only to find out that it that debuted a year before her birth.

What the hell, man? How the jumping crap did I wind up like this? Upset about not being asked to study enough, indignant about the ignorance of a writer of Harlequin Romances, and having to explain why a story about a space ship full of hot-blooded young folk would have been popular to a fan of Firefly.

I feel safer now...

It's about time the Justice department got down to protecting the American people from the true threats to the American way of life: teenage boys who are interested in looking at porn.

No, seriously. If there only would have been a direct link between him and the files found on the hard drive of his family computer, this kid could've wound up serving a 90 year sentence. As it stands, he just barely squeaked out of having to be registered as a sex-offender. At age 16. For looking at porn on-line.

Good job, Maricopa County DAs. Good job, Yahoo. Good job, America.



Bunch of freaking idiots...

A message to the citizens of England

We are all well aware that the English feel some sense of ownership towards the language named for your country. No doubt the world would be a poorer place without the works of Jonathan Swift, Geoffrey Chaucer or Iain Hollingshead.

For the record, however, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 million people living in the UK these days. Not to slight the cultures of Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland or the Isle of Man, but just about everyone in that total is a speaker of English. That still leaves the UK significantly behind the number of English speakers in the US. Assuming, of course, that the 2001 census estimate of 215 million is roughly accurate. And behind the estimated 200 million Chinese people who are aiming for ESL fluency by the year 2020. Depending on who you believe, there are anywhere from 20 million to 100 million to 330 million people in India with ability right ranging from mother tongue fluency down to casual conversational right now. Do the math. If want to find an English speaker on planet Earth, you've only got about one chance in five of getting someone from the UK. And that's assuming the highest number of English literate UK citizens and the lowest numbers of English literate non-UK citizens1.

Whatever people may have said about the modern uses of Latin, there's not much Latin coming out of Rome these days. I don't mean to imply that the Queen's English is a dead language. But there's not much evidence to point to the future of English as strongly resembling anything heard around Eton. Or Oxford. Or anywhere else "public school" is taken to mean "place for upper class boys to engage in sport and light pederasty." All of which is to say the following.

Attention, citizens of England!
Please be aware that:

1. An accent unlike yours is not unusual by any stretch of the imagination
   
2. Pronunciation unlike yours is not unlikely
3. If the best you can manage for humor is observations about points 1 or 2, don't bother. Those jokes have been made countless times before.
   

Thank you.

1. For purposes of the rather rough estimate made here, I used a UK population of 60 million as compared to 215, 20, 20 and 19.5 millions for the US, India, Australia and Canada. I left out the Francophone Canucks along with everyone in New Zealand, Ireland, the Philippines, Africa, Asia and continental Europe.

The Fear

For a while there's been a big hoo-hah about a plan to introduce government ID cards that will be mandatory for all UK citizens. As it stands now, UK nationals are not required to carry any ID while just walking around in public.
Although there is no federal law in the US requiring people to produce ID on demand from police officers, there are a variety of statutes authorizing police to hold, detain or arrest individuals for failing to identify themselves on demand. Now, whether or not that goes beyond just giving one's name and address is not entirely clear to me. But the general rule is that in the United States the police do have the power to stop and search anyone at any time provided they can offer a reasonable justification to do so. While I think that agreeing to be searched, especially while at the business end of a gun or baton, seems like a ridiculous way to help keep streets safe, it would technically be at the request of an officer. And at least one state I know of specifically says that refusing to assist an officer is a crime.
All of which is to say that while you're not technically required to carry documents that support your claims of who you are while in the US, it is easily within the powers of an officer of the peace to make things rather unpleasant for you at any given time should you not produce those documents upon request.
I don't suppose that I should be too surprised, then, by the steps taken in the UK to start requiring non-UK citizens to carry ID. Not to over dramatize things, but I suspect that the rise in interest in keeping track of who's going where and when isn't going to subside any time soon. And this current shot is aimed at, surprise surprise, foreigners.
Should I be upset that, as an outside-type-person, I'd be required to carry id at all times in the UK? I guess that abiding by the laws of the land I choose to enter, as opposed to the one I'm born in, leaves me little ground for dissent. But I can't say I'm particularly pleased at the prospect of
1) toting around a card with detailed biometric information about me that seems to be easily hackable,
2) being made vulnerable to arrest and deportation simply for not carrying a card
3) being marked as separate from any other "law-abiding" person simply for being born somewhere else.
But then, I guess there are a lot of things that don't particularly please me...

National appeal. Or Emma Peel. Whatever.

I know I've said it a bunch of times before, but Japan was a crazy-wack-cartoon-opera of a country. It was absurd and dignified and too often surreal to be as bad as it seemed. There were so many things about that place that were just unimaginable in an American context that it was easy to find something fascinating. Sport as art? Check. Writing as spiritual exercise? Got it. Mutant-grasshopper-cyborg as cultural hero? Of course, haven't you been paying attention?

Somehow I expected to stumble into something like that in England. Some sort of British cultural item that would be fascinating and endearing and would give me a entry point from which to start getting into life here. Maybe not anything as immediately satisfying as, say, Sapporo-style ramen, but something, right? I mean, besides cricket. Which seems to be something that England can't really claim as a specialty anymore anyway...

Words

I am, at this very moment, supposed to be writing a short story for this M.A. course. But I don't have a single idea that seems worth a damn. It seemed like an ideal opportunity to raid the old journal I used to keep when I first got to Japan but I got distracted by what may have been a most prophetic comment by one of my colleagues from Fukui:

"You've outlived your uselessness. Now get back to work."
-D. Rosenfeld

Damn. He may have been right...

A little bit of that dough-ray-me

A while ago I tried making my own bread. I think it came out all right. The crust was a little thick, but tasted all right, if I do say so myself.

Next baking task: challah!

Compromise

One of the things that seems to be in the British media kind of a lot lately is stuff concerned with managing the impact of human life on the ecosystem. Stuff like reducing your carbon footprint or cutting back on the distance your food has to travel from source to stomach. So there's a sense that everyone is expected to sorta pitch in and do their part. Which may be some sort of green descendant of Britain's WWII spirit.

Being a civic-minded chap, I figured to do my part too. Last night when I saw a spider the size of a nine-volt battery hanging out near the sink in the bathroom, I thought "great, he can live in here and eat bugs."

It wasn't until I was going to bed that I realized that I was going to try and sleep in a poorly sealed room with a spider the size of a nine-volt battery roaming around, probably looking for somewhere warm to bunk.

Ecolomologism sucks sometimes.

Do it yourself

Tried something new this morning: making my own bread. Modified a recipe I found on the internet, and had a bit of trouble converting the instructions and quantities to metric. Turns out you can't reliably convert a volume measure like cups of flour to milliliters of flour. Even if you find a volume-weight conversion, the type of flour will vary, and that'll throw off the conversion.

Anyway, the dough is rising now. I'm going to punch it down and see if the yeast has got backbone enough to try rising again. I'll let you know how it turns out.

-Loafing in London