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.
Month: March 2010
Mina’s passport photo
The vice consul who handled our case thought this was a great passport photo.
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
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 (though not half as funny as finding out that there is a Thai way of counting months for the Chinese zodiac and that Mina is a Tiger like me instead of an Ox because she was born in December) that way. I asked the vice consul to explain better what a non-citizen who bears all the rights (and responsibilities) of a citizen is, but even she didn’t know, so hey, that’s some pedantic shit right there.
Bangkok was hot and muggy as ever, and it was a relief to get back home. It’s hotter here, but it’s kind of a clean heat – Bangkok pollution just has a way of working itself into every pore and just making you sticky and gross. Plus, the scourge of mosquitoes in our room was epic. They attacked Max and I until Nam and I just got fed up with it and turned on all the lights and went medieval on their asses. It was like a Tarantino scene because I kept having to use various tools to get at these mosquitoes hiding in different places – a rolled-up newspaper to bat one off the ceiling, and a pillow to smash on in a headboard groove. One even got inside Mina’s portable framed mosquito net and bit her cheek, which woke her up, too.
Itchy, screaming babies at 3 in the morning sucks hard. So getting payback against the insect kingdom in general felt really good, and after we devoted twenty minutes to smashing every bug in the room, we fell asleep again and had no more problems. Up until that though, I’ve never seen mosquitoes so voracious. We had the AC and two floor fans pointed at Max and the bastards were still getting through to torture him.
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 now.
Michaelsoft Binbows (?????????????)
Secondhand PC and parts shop somewhere in Japan
photo credit: Unknown awesome person
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 //////////////////
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2 ????? ????
3 ?????? ???
4 ????? ????
5 ????? ????
6 ????? ???????
7 ?????? ??
8 ?????? ???
9 ??????? ????
10 ?????? ???
??? ???? ???? ???
???? ???? ???????
?? ??? ????
1 ?????? ????
2 ????? ????
3 ?????? ???
4 ????? ????
5 ????? ????
6 ????? ???????
7 ?????? ??
8 ?????? ???
9 ??????? ????
10 ?????? ???
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???? ????? ????
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Language notes:
Max will turn two on April 18, and right now the majority of what he speaks is Thai, followed by English, and then just a bit of Japanese. Some people worried about it being a problem for him, but I think they basically underestimate the learning capacity of children.
So far, there’s been no problems and his Thai pronunciation is already much better than mine. The nanny is careful to speak mostly standard Thai around the babies, so that’s covered as well (otherwise they’d basically be learning to speak Laotian – we are in an area (Issan or NE region) very close to Laos regarding language and culture as well as geography).
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 tasty).
A vital key to surviving in any given area over an extended period of time is knowing the secret menus of your favorite haunts. The secret menu of this place was somewhat amusing:
I loves me some chicken bones! (They use a bunch of these for the broth every day.)
Notes: This shop is located on Soi Srisawat between RMU and Spirit House Kway Chap, on the right side if headed away from RMU. Kway chap w/o egg 20 baht, w/egg 25 baht, chicken carcass 20 (25?) baht.
Shift + Esc
This is the best Google Chrome shortcut / utility I’ve come across recently (try it; it’s an internal Task Manager).
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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).
