Category: general

The Guardian: UN alert as nuclear plans go missing (via Drudge)

According to the Japan Times (presented by Ampontan of Japundit), co-ed bathing is coming back into style in Japan.

In other news, a group of blind people were turned away from an onsen in Kanagawa.

The first story is funny. Especially with Ampontan’s commentary.

The second story is just sad. Why the onsen wasn’t willing to have someone available to help the people, instead of just saying “We can’t guarantee your safety, so you have to leave”, is beyond me.

However, you can combine the two for a cheap laugh, if you want.

I was just thinking this morning during my bike ride about how I wanted an mp3 player so I could practice Japanese while exercising. Then I came home and found this:

This thing is tiny and cute, and it holds one whole gig!!!

Hai, man, seriously. You rule. Thank you so much! I am totally overwhelmed!

Pieman of Noodlepie mentions an architectural contest for the worldwide expansion of a Vietnamese coffee chain that is changing its name to “G7”. He remarks:

One other thing, why the name G7? Does anyone know? Is it the number of different beans in the ‘ground’ blend? Whenever I hear the name G7 coffee I can’t help but think of world summits and presidents decked out in Chinese dress or wearing sombreros. But that G7 is now the G8. G7 is so not coffee, no?

I had no idea what he was talking about, so I followed that link to G8.

Wow. I am so totally ignorant :> This seems like something I should be aware of, doesn’t it?

I’m thinking it might be a good idea to just sit and read the Wikipedia for a couple hours every day…

Yes friends, a Democrat said that.

As I was listening to “Tsuioku”, track 16 from the Kyou Kara Maou soundtrack, Sean glanced around and said, “That’s from your little king anime, isn’t it?”

Hehehehehe.

I totally need one of these.

Sitting at their desks is about the last thing workers would do in Dr. James Levine’s office of the future. Instead of being sedentary in front of their computers, they’d stand. But instead of standing still, they’d walk on a treadmill. And instead of meeting around a conference table, they’d talk business while walking laps on a track.

That’s exactly how Levine, a Mayo Clinic obesity researcher, and several of his colleagues have been working for the past five weeks or so.

“I hate going to the gym, which may be partly why I’m so interested in this,” he said, keeping up a 1 mph pace on his treadmill while checking e-mail and fielding questions from a reporter.

Since I have a wireless keyboard and mouse now, I could totally rig something up in here. Hmmm…

Ed links to this article over at CNN about a guy CMT hired to watch The Dukes of Hazzard and blog about it. The young man, Christopher Nelson, receives $100,000 per year in compensation.

In addition to blogging, Nelson’s duties include brainstorming clever ad campaigns and traveling roughly once a month to promote the series.

In today’s Questionable Content, we discover that Raven’s first name is Blodwyn, which is a Welsh name meaning “white flowers”. I noticed right away that the name was spelled with a ‘y’, indicating the masculine gender–for a girl, it should be “Blodwen”. When I did a search to find out what the name meant, I discovered that some baby name websites actually have this reversed, claiming that “Blodwen” is the male form. Some sites, on the other hand, state that the names are both feminine, and simply variants of each other.

I just wanted to point out that I know better :>

I am guessing that the Welsh don’t actually have the name “Blodwyn”, but that people who were casually familiar with certain Welsh spelling conventions happened to transcribe “Blodwen” with a y. This is understandable. When I first started learning about Wales, I thought the ys were prettier than the es, and that they should be for women. Now, though, I see a y and think “Man!” It’s all perspective…

Either way, “Blodwyn” is used a lot online. The ubiquitousness makes me wonder if that’s actually how they say “white flowers” in Wales, or if I’m (gasp) wrong about the masculinity thing. (It could happen. But I would be very upset!)

There was a band called Blodwyn Pig in the 60s, so named by “a stoned hippy friend just back from the Bhuddist trail”. I am not sure what this even means…but I thought you’d like to know.

When I was in fourth grade, my mom got me a set of colorful pencils with my name embossed on them in gold (probably from the Lillian Vernon catalog). I took these pencils with me to my new school–fourth grade was the year I made the transition from private school to public school, away from Lexington Christian School to Brookside Elementary in Nicholasville.

On the first day, a redheaded boy asked me if he could borrow one of my pencils.

“Don’t do it!” the other kids whispered to me. “Don’t give it to him!”

Everyone is so mean here, I thought disdainfully. I passed the boy a pencil, proud of myself for being so generous in the face of peer pressure.

Later, I noticed that he had scraped my name off the pencil. So he was the mean one, and all the other kids were right! I felt like a dumbass, but more than that, I was horrified that he would try to steal something I’d lent him!

So, of course, I went and told the teacher immediately. That was just what you did when there was a problem. She made him give the pencil back, not that it made me happy to have a blue pencil with a big gaping wood section where my name should be.

That boy, Anthony Bruner, later became my boyfriend. In fourth grade. Yeah, I dunno. My only real memory of that whole “thing” was sitting in the cafeteria next to Eddie Benedict, my best friend, and having Anthony sitting across from me. He looked at the two of us and said, “That ain’t right.” And I quickly assured him that Eddie and I were just friends.

I’m really not sure why 1) he wanted to be my boyfriend and 2) I said yes. I guess I was just going with the flow.

My love life wasn’t stagnant after that–I ended up dating Mark Kimmel at some point, and rejecting Eddie’s advances in 7th grade. However, the fact remained that Anthony and I had never actually broken up. I therefore remarked to someone in 8th grade gym class that Anthony and I were technically still dating.

This unfortunately opened me up for some serious mocking, as by this point I was no longer the cute(?) transfer student, but was now the weird girl who wore dowdy clothes and talked to walls. (Kids routinely threw food and garbage at me at lunchtime.) For days thereafter, Anthony and his girls kept whispering and looking at me and laughing, and I felt dumb for saying anything. I guess by sharing that “fun fact”, I was trying to recapture that feeling of belonging without trying. Obviously I failed!

I never really thought about the motivations behind Anthony’s pencil-stealing until today, oddly. It occurred to me out of the blue that maybe he took the pencil and scratched off my name because he resented the fact that no one bought him pencils with his name on them. Maybe he thought I was rich, since I had come from a private school–even though nothing could have been further from the truth. Something to think about.

And now, to sit back and wait for the adult Anthony Bruner to happen upon my blog. ;P

Just started watching a new series. Does this guy look familiar at all?

His name’s Takasugi Yuusuke. That last name is interesting to me for the following reason:

高杉 Takasugi
上杉 Uesugi

高 (taka) means tall or high. 上 (ue) means above. And both names have the same second part, 杉 (sugi). Coincidence?!?!

Actually, the art and last name aren’t the only similarities. The voice actor is the same, too. :D

Common voice actors in Hiatari Ryoukou, Touch, and Miyuki (all three based on manga by Adachi Mitsuru):

Voice Actor	Hiatari Ryoukou	Touch	Miyuki
Mitsuya Yuji	Takasugi Yuusuke	Uesugi Tatsuya	—
Tsuru Hiromi	Seki Keiko (love triangle!)	Nishio Sachiko (former club manager)	Kajima Miyuki (more love triangle goodness)
Tanaka Hideyuki	Sakamoto	Kashiwaba Eijirou (evil coach!!)	—
Inoue Kazuhiko	Muraki Katsuhiko	Nitta Akio (Sumi Tech’s star player)	—
Hayashiya Kobuhei	Ariyama Takashi (big soccer player)	Matsudaira Koutarou (big catcher)	—
Tominaga Miina	Ohta Maria	Nitta Yuka (ugh)	—
Siozawa Kaneto	Mikimoto Shin (the playboy)	Kuroki Takeshi (former baseball club captain/pitcher)	Muraki Yoshio

That’s a lot of similar cast for those first two shows…the art is very similar in all three, as well, though the ears on the guys are drawn kind of oddly in Miyuki. Hiatari Ryouko and Touch were both produced by Group TAC, while Miyuki was produced by Kitty Films.

I do find it interesting that while they had no problems using the same voice actors for male leads and supporting roles and female supporting roles, they didn’t recycle voice actors for female leads. Ultimately, you can posit that the male lead is going to end up with the female character who has a unique voice actress ;>

I knew going in that the character designs were practically the same as those of Touch, but I didn’t realize the similarity wasn’t going to end there. I was thinking, for example, that Hiatari Ryoukou would have nothing whatsoever to do with baseball.

It would appear I was mistaken! In fact, episode 2 seems to be foreshadowing that Yuusuke will join the baseball club at some point, even though he states that he wants to be on the cheering squad. (Tatsuya had his stint in the boxing club, after all…)

Maybe Myoujou will go to the Koushien!! @_@

It was a nice couple of weeks, getting to see how things work in an art department and taking crash courses in design software. I enjoyed it.

Ultimately they let me go. After last Thursday I was kind of anticipating it; what I wanted and what they wanted didn’t seem to be meshing very well. I told them thank you for letting me have the experience and that I really enjoyed my time there. They told me to give them a call later on to see if an entry-level position had opened up that I could apply for.

It was all very polite. And really, it’s fine. I am disappointed in myself for not being where they wanted me to be, but at the same time I realize that that would have been impossible. I did my best, I worked hard, I learned. That’s all anyone can really ask of themselves.

And, strikingly, I gained this position based solely on my resume and the interview. That means that I can effectively present myself, which is a nice thing to know. What I need to do now is find something I really want to do, and put all my energies into getting it, just like I did with this internship.

I’ll probably fail again. I don’t have any real experience at anything. But these little steps will guide me to where I need to be. There’s no reason to be discouraged.

Time to take the next step.

Edit 5:42 pm: Never mind. My internship isn’t over. They called the wrong person. Ehehehehehehehe!

Hai just linked me to an open letter concerning an “Applied Behavioral Analysis” program and how it traumatized a four-year-old autistic child.

We believe it to be particularly destructive of a child’s emotional development that hugs and kisses, gestures we normally use to express affection and love, are used instrumentally in many behavioral programs. The child is required to give and to receive these gestures as part of the training, without regard to his or her actual feelings. These “behaviors” will therefore come to have a different meaning for your child. Your child may develop obsessive-compulsive behavior in this area if he or she is in an ABA program that is similar to the one we had, since the meaning of a behavior comes out of the context it is most used in. Hugs and kisses, in the program we had, meant “I surrender (my project of autonomy, my understanding of my pain, my resistance to your will, my attempt to obtain freedom to pursue my intrinsic interest in this toy or manipulative).” They meant “I seek safety in this behavior” of performing the required hugs and kisses, because “I have learned that then the pain will stop (and so will my right to choose who will receive my affections).”

I start to cry just reading that paragraph.

We have come to believe that the attempt to eliminate a targeted “behavior” by responding to it in a discouraging way (or not responding at all) is very dangerous. Keep in mind that what is being extinguished is not simply “a behavior”: when this occurs with human beings, as opposed to the animal studies where the term originated, the process is much more complex. What is suppressed is “a choice,” and that implies a deep internal restructuring of the child’s understanding. If the behavior to be extinguished was his way of communicating distress, he may learn that he should not seek comfort when he hurts. He may learn that he should hide pain and somatize it (e.g. develop other symptoms such as stomach aches). He may conclude he is not loved. He might even become so alarmed that he develops symptoms of PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder] as our son did.

[…]

We believe that one of the primary reasons our son’s PTSD is so severe and so persistent is that the assault on his body, in the form of restraint that was painful and terrifying, took place in the sanctity of his own home. Home is the place that must be safe, that must be the place of rest where we let down our guard, and must be the place where we feel protected. It is a fact that some of the most severe cases of PTSD occur when the assault took place in the victim’s own home, because where there exists a deep expectation of safety it is most traumatic to have it suddenly violated.

There’s a lot more in that letter, and elsewhere on the CIBRA (Children Injured by Restraint and Aversives) website.

I am just appalled.

I’ve never taken any psychology courses, so I can’t speak to the validity of these arguments, but restraining a child, punishing him for expressing his hurt and fear, refusing to indulge his interests and instead leading him along like a dumb animal…I have trouble understanding how any of that is supposed to help him mature emotionally and intellectually.

Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s just supposed to make him shut up.

British Transport Secretary Alistair Darling (don’t you just love that name? Alistair Darling. Wow) is proposing replacing a sales tax on fuel with a charge for how much driving people do. I read a similar proposition for California that involved GPS devices awhile back.

It’s still an interesting idea. I haven’t been to England, so I don’t know if viable alternatives to driving exist there. Hopefully they do; I’d like to see how this would be implemented, how privacy concerns would be dealt with, and whether or not the measure would ultimately succeed in its goal of cutting down on driving. You never really know until you try.

MSN has a piece up called Why Employers Like Liberal Arts Grads. The answer seems to be: “Because they can read and write.”

Japanese convenience stores are totally wasting food. I’m not sure why they’re not allowed to discount items that are close to expiration–maybe they’re afraid soon-to-expire items will take up too much of the combini‘s limited space.

“In the dozen or so years this store has been running, we’ve never sold all of our packed lunches,” the head of the store says. It’s because the store stocks up about 10 percent more goods than it expects to sell.

“We don’t want to throw stuff out, but customers will desert us if we run out of stock,” the store official says. It seems that this harsh view by consumers is creating a mountain of garbage.

“The food can still be eaten and I think it’s really wasteful,” confesses the head of the store. “We hear that there are lots of starving children in the world, so can’t anything be done?”

Meanwhile: Aphids!

Entomologists say the leap in the number of aphids this year was triggered by several climatic conditions, including a warm weather and low rainfall.

The aphid problem became so bad in some areas that measures had to be taken.In mid-May, a public elementary school in Tokyo’s Kokubunji cut off branches from a zelkova tree on the school yard after residents complained about the countless number of aphids there.

“We have never seen anything like this before,” the school’s principal said. “We had to cut the branches because pesticide wouldn’t be good for the children.”

The Pieman investigates hamburgers on the streets of Vietnam today. They actually look pretty good, despite the lack of grilling.

Speaking of burgers…yow. (…I want to try one o_o)

And finally, here’s a funny story:

An off-duty police officer on a Sunday drive saw something awfully familiar – his recently stolen Volkswagen Jetta.

North Charleston patrolman Ethan Bernardi whipped his cruiser around and pulled over the stolen vehicle. He called other deputies, who arrested three suspects, police said.

That is awesome. The title of the article is pretty good, too.

Vows and quotations chosen by Sean and Heather; ceremony arranged and conducted by the Rev. Daniel L. King.

Dearly beloved, we are here to celebrate the joining of Sean and Heather, who have been best friends for a long time over a long distance, but whose relationship has grown to become much more than friendship. Today they will publicly declare their love for each other in a sacred and profound commitment of love for life, as Heather has completed her long journey from Kentucky to make a new home here in Augusta with Sean.

In marriage, two persons turn to each other in search of a greater fulfillment than either can achieve alone. Marriage is a going forth, a bold step into the future; it is risking what we are for the sake of that we yet can be. Only by becoming vulnerable, by giving of oneself and by sharing with another, can the mysterious process of growth take place. Only in loyalty and devotion bestowed upon another can that which is eternal in life emerge and be known. Two among us, who have stood apart, come now in our presence to declare their love and to be united in marriage.

If life has meaning to us at all, it is because of love. It is Love which ennobles our human experience. The greatest gift bestowed to humanity is the gift of love between two persons. It is the basis for the wholeness and peace of family, and the only hope for peace among the peoples of the earth.

As the poet Kahlil Gibran has said, Love is a sacred mystery…
To those who love, it remains forever wordless…
Love is a night where candles burn in space,
Love is a dream beyond our reaching;
Love is a noon where all shepherds are at peace…
Love is an eventide, and a stillness, and a homecoming;
Love is a gentle sleep filled with a dream.

Sean and Heather, it is a great joy and pleasure for us to be present with you on this important day, to be sharing in your ceremony, and witnessing to the covenants and promises you are making to each other.

I must remind you that the vows you are about to repeat to each other belong entirely to you. The words which any of us speak have no magic in themselves, and nothing we say or do today can ultimately make your marriage endure with the beauty, fidelity, and joy which each of you deserve from your partner. Only you, by living with complete integrity and diligence can fulfill all of the best intentions of your vows and make them last.

So it is not to lofty words or institutions that we appeal at this hour of commitment, but rather to the resources which you each draw from, deep within your holy selves, the essence of the ultimate and the divine.

I ask you to grasp the hand of your beloved and look deep into her eyes:

In reaffirming the relationship we have been building together,
I, Sean, take you Heather, to be no other than yourself,
And promise to be your loyal and faithful husband,
Loving what I know of you, trusting what I don’t yet know,
With respect for your integrity
And faith in your abiding love, through all our years,
And in all that life shall bring us, I accept you as my wife.

In reaffirming the relationship we have been building together,
I, Heather, take you Sean, to be no other than yourself,
And promise to be your loyal and faithful wife,
Loving what I know of you, trusting what I don’t yet know,
With respect for your integrity
And faith in your abiding love, through all our years,
And in all that life shall bring us, I accept you as my husband.

Reid, as Sean’s dad, I understand you have a position of great responsibility as custodian of the rings. May I have them now to complete the ritual?

These rings are symbolic of your ultimate commitments, which from this day will have no beginning and no end. By the use of these rings you express in tangible and visible form the unbroken circle of your love, so that wherever you go, you will be reminded of the promises you have made to return to your shared life together. May these rings always call to mind both the freedom and the power of your love.

Sean, as you place this ring on the heart-finger of Heather’s hand, please repeat these words: I give you this ring to wear upon your hand as a symbol of our commitment and love.

Heather, as you place this ring on the heart-finger of Sean’s hand, please repeat these words: I give you this ring to wear upon your hand as a symbol of our commitment and love.

The writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh has written:
When you love someone, you cannot love them all the time in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It’s an impossibility, it’s even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist, in terror, its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity, in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

Sean and Heather, you have told all of your closest family and friends who have been able to gather here to share this moment of joy that you deeply love each other, that you wish to live together to affirm and deepen your relationship. By repeating your vows and exchanging rings, you have formed your own union in friendship, in respect for each other, and in profound love, so it is my honor to acknowledge and declare that you are, for all time, now joined as husband and wife, wife and husband, according to all the laws of this State. Would you care to seal your covenants with an embrace?

May that glory which rests on all who love rest upon you, and bless you and keep you, and fill you with happiness and a gracious spirit. Despite all changes of time and fortune, may all that is noble and true abound in your hearts, and abide with you, to give you strength in all your days together. Sean and Heather, believe in what is yours, believe in who you are, believe in the richness and the power of what lies in the depth you share. And go now in great happiness assured that all our hearts go with you both.

I present to this happy congregation, Heather and Sean Meadows. Please gather around them and give them your blessing.