Back in June 2005 I put my in-laws through the Battle Robot generator. Today I’m repeating the experiment, but this time the “plastic pals who are fun to battle with” come from the art world.
Competitors can battle on one of three factors: Force, Handling, and Weaponry
Sorry for the recent spate of brief posts. Since returning to Canada I’ve unexpectedly found other, non-blog activities to occupy my spare time. Activities which will have no further mention except to say that they are almost completely uproductive.
In any case, today I have a photo of an abandoned skull-cat-jester from my last day in Japan.
In most countries I’ve spent any significant amount of time in—read that as very few—children, and especially babies, are to a certain extent fashion accessories. Japan is no different, and sometimes a bit more extreme than what we’re used to in North America. Today’s featured creature is the object (or is that subject?) of someone’s overdeveloped mothering complex.
Well, we made it. There’s no place like home—though I’m not really sure what home is at the moment—and we didn’t even need to steal any witchly footwear to get back.
What follows is a brief summary of events. Hopefully it’s coherent despite my sleep-deprived brain.
This is something I found on the blog of an acquaintance in Japan. I feel a bit strange posting but, but as it was online already and I haven’t given a link—you’ll have to go looking on your own if it’s that important—so I don’t feel strange enough to not post it. I could almost imagine having this conversation, except that as far as I know, my sister doesn’t have the issues discussed in the quote, and my mom’s English is much, much better.
I’m not sure how long this will be online, but I found an interesting juxtaposition of headlines on the Globe and Mail web site. (For those of you unfamiliar with Canadian news media, the Globe and Mail is one of Canada’s national newspapers.) It made me wonder about what really goes on in editors’ minds, if anything.
If I’m reading lines between today’s news stories properly, there are some strange goings-on at the Canada-US border.
Today we revisit the photos I took at the Comme Ça Store in Riverwalk Kitakyushu a few days before Christmas 2003. I was rendered completely speechless at the time, but I’ve since recovered. Even so, before reading further you may want to put down any food and drink you might be consuming.
I’m not making any promises, but don’t say I didn’t warn you, either.
Today I spent the day at Jarrod’s school, watching their undokai, a kind of field day or sports festival. It was hot and dusty, with a lot of sun and wind. It was also a lot of fun to watch, filled as it was with an assortment of unusual games and races.
But that’s a topic for a multi-part post that I don’t have time or brain power to write tonight. Instead, I’ll be presenting something completely unrelated. As the title says, three houses and a passage.
A couple of weeks ago, around the time I was starting to think about writing the Kokura fashion report, one of the Japanese teachers at my school received a courier package. That’s Japanese as in literature, composition, and such, since besides me, everyone at my school—students and staff—is ethnically Japanese. The receiving of a parcel isn’t unusual in and of itself, since various teachers often get deliveries: textbook samples, standardized test scores, home ec supplies. The list goes on. I only noticed it subconsciously, absorbed as I was in correcting some second-year student translations—which, coincidentally, were all about fashion—until the teacher in question stopped by my desk and showed me the open box and started gesturing towards its contents. She eventually flagged down an English teacher to translate.
I don’t intend to turn this blog into a daily list of links, but today I’ve got a random assortment of stuff, some of which can’t wait until I get time to write a full post about it, some of which has been hanging around waiting for me to get around to write about. And some stuff which doesn’t deserve its own post. But I’ll let you guess which ones are which. It’s basically a whole bunch of random that I’ve somehow managed to connect together. Food, technology, courtship & marriage, and more!