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 ?????? ????
2 ????? ????
3 ?????? ???
4 ????? ????
5 ????? ????
6 ????? ???????
7 ?????? ??
8 ?????? ???
9 ??????? ????
10 ?????? ???
??? ???? ???? ???
???? ???? ???????
?? ??? ????
1 ?????? ????
2 ????? ????
3 ?????? ???
4 ????? ????
5 ????? ????
6 ????? ???????
7 ?????? ??
8 ?????? ???
9 ??????? ????
10 ?????? ???
???? ??? ???? ???
??? ??? ????
???? ????? ????
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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.
20100303j700i-bluekapom0003.jpg
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:
20100303j700i-bluekapom0002.jpg
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).

missiles

I was browsing teh intarwebs and stumbled upon this pic:
cat_missle.jpg
…and all I could think of was a photo we took a few years ago on the beach in Sumoto:
20060503awaji-jump-kana-0267.JPG
I say “we” because I don’t remember who was using Kana’s point-and-shoot (EXIF says it was a Casio EX-Z500) for this jump series; it was probably me or Kana or Faye. It took me a while to find the photo because I couldn’t spot it in my archives, so I ended up logging into Flickr for the first time in two years (A long story in itself. Basically, the Yahoo login system is fuxxored.) and looking for it among the earlier photos we posted in the might as well jump photo group. Even though I’d basically given up on the NEW! IMPROVED! and utterly soulless Flickr experience after wholeheartedly embracing its awesome start up and being within the first few users to upload over 10,000 photos, many people have stuck with it – that group really grew when I was gone.

Stevie on Sunday


…because it’s our day to chill and listen to YouTube music. Max got to see twenty vids, now it’s my turn for one. Actually, there is a version with an actual music video here, but the audio sucks.
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It’s funny, I played this song a few months back when we were setting up a PA, and my coworker Bruce suddenly stood up and announced he hadn’t “heard this since it came out!”