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Japan – The Strange Country
The author got too much flak for drawing little squinty eyes (with his own little squinty eyes), so he pulled the English version. Those people were missing the point, really. The artwork (infographics) tells most of the story even if you don’t understand Japanese.
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Mina’s passport photo
The vice consul who handled our case thought this was a great passport photo.
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Props to Mika
My sister, Mika, who works with our darling brother Adam darling penguins and otters at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, was interviewed for an NPR program concerning climate change and its impact on the ocean. The interview can be found here: MBA Advocates Action on Climate Change
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What Mina Thinks of Bangkok (Daddy Concurs)
Quite predictably, the long car ride to and from Bangkok was not appreciated by either baby, which they were quite vocal about. This was a kind of test run; do we really want to unleash these two on a plane full of innocents for the cumulative nineteen or so hours it takes to get back to Cali (w/one stopover)? The answer might just be children’s cold medicine… Mina’s birth abroad has been duly reported, and her passport is in the works. Legally, she’s not a citizen exactly but has all the same rights as a citizen when she gets the passport. Say what? Yeah, it’s kind of a funny thing…
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We Against the World
I have a master’s class to teach this morning, then our whole family + nanny are off to Bangkok. We have an appointment tomorrow morning at the embassy’s ACS building to report Mina’s birth abroad and apply for a passport. The problem? There are 100,000 demonstrators trying to get noticed at high profile venues such as, say, in the front of the US embassy. So I’m in my crowd-dodging mode and have hardened my forearms just in case. I would have waited for the demonstrators to go home, but last year it took them months just to give up their hold on the airport, and we really need this passport…
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Michaelsoft Binbows (?????????????)
Secondhand PC and parts shop somewhere in Japan photo credit: Unknown awesome person
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ippon demo ninjin
Max is a little less enthused by this than I am, but I found the greatest song for learning counting (and introducing the concept of counters) in Japanese this week: It’s just a great song, really. I hereby declare this a Cosmic Buddha reunion number. There was apparently some fluff about this song being switched to the A-side when the album was repressed, so they repressed again as it originally was, on the B-side. The thing is, it seems this song was originally (released in 1975) not very popular and the A-side song that became a hit, when compared now, sounds really boring: ?????????. //////////////// LYRICS ////////////////// 1 ?????? ????…
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Cornershop Kway Chap
Last week I visited at a noodle shop that I thought was new, but my coworker said it’s been around for a few years. This is mainly what they sell, standard kway chap noodles served Vietnamese style in clear chicken stock with rice noodles of medium thickness (you can also get instant ramen served in kway chap stock). This is opposed to the other style of kway chap popular in Thailand, the Chinese kind in brown stock with blood cubes, bamboo shoots, and spiral flat noodles (this Chinese kind is usually done very poorly in Thailand IMHO, but when done properly, with fresh ingredients and duck meat, can be very…
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Shift + Esc
This is the best Google Chrome shortcut / utility I’ve come across recently (try it; it’s an internal Task Manager). ///////////// I’ll even give you another killer one just for reading this: You can delete entries from an auto-complete drop down list by highlighting them and hitting Shift + Delete (this is actually a carry-over from Firefox).
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Floating
