As you may have noticed, I’ve been reading a new blog by Justin Klein called Adventures in Kyoto. (You also may have noticed that I have a separate “Japan Blogs” section in my blogroll now. I decided to stop denying the truth.)
Today he’s got a cool post up called Bushido and Jump-Rope, and I wanted to spotlight it. It’s got nice pictures and interesting commentary on the way the Japanese strive for excellence. It’s also got the following picture caption, which cracked me up:
You want to look as hardcore as this guy? Just follow my step-by-step instructions: 1) Get a friend to kick you in the balls. 2) That is all.
This actually brings me to a comment about his site design, which I think is unique and clever, but also somewhat problematic. In Bloglines, the pictures come in full-size, and the captions appear beneath them as hyperlinks. This must be how they are rendered in the HTML. But the site’s stylesheet shrinks the images into thumbnails and hides the captions until you mouseover the thumbnail, at which point the image expands to fit the window (or until it is at full size, I assume. My monitor isn’t quite big enough to check), and the caption appears. I think this is really, really cool. However, something in the way this is accomplished causes the caption to only be given one viewable line, and, unfortunately, that hilarious caption is too long. I wouldn’t have been able to read it if I hadn’t been using Bloglines.
Still, the site is very cool. I like that it’s not using blog software that I’m accustomed to. And it’s got a “kanji of the day” box in the sidebar!
But back to today’s entry…it’s insightful, and I think any student of Japanese culture would be interested. If you still need a reason to check it out, he’s got a crazy jumprope video you might enjoy :>