Engrish

Japanese Engrish is somehow special. Basically there are two popular styles. The more widespread style is the design-style: Engrish words are used as design elements for shop windows, advertisements, t-shirts, etc. It is particularly popular to chose words with several meanings, and concatenate them in very creative ways. The second style is the babelfish-style. This style is only popular in areas with tourists such as Tokyo. It is used to translate important signs and to entertain tourists.

In addition, to make things even more interesting, sometimes the words are first translated into Japanese katakana, and then back to the Roman alphabet. (There is no "L" in Katakana.)

Angela pointed me to www.engrish.com. I think I should start taking more pictures too :-)

Tea Ceremony

I finally got the chance to participate in a tea ceremony. It was a lot more impressive than I expected it to be. At first it seems very simple and plain, but it is full of important details. There is a lot of beauty in the simple utensils, and the tradition has a very interesting history. If I'm not mistaken, politeness and respect play a very important role in the ceremony. There seems to be an infinite number of possibilities to be rude. Some people spend a life time studying the ceremony. One thing I learned for sure is that it is not really about tea. Strangely it reminded me of Karate somehow. Maybe because of the way we were sitting, bowing, and the precision of every detail. Most likely it was the precision of even the smallest movements that reminded me of the Katas in Karate. It was fascinating! I'll probably be adding pictures to this post later on.

Reasons to Celebrate Calendar

In German there is a saying that you have to celebrate when it happens. ("Man soll die Feste feiern wie sie fallen.") For example, you should celebrate your birthday on the day it is, and not a week later! (Buxi!)

Anyway, parties are great, and the fact that we only have one birthday a year shouldn't limit the number of parties we celebrate. So what I am looking for is some web service where I can enter a date and get a list of good reasons to celebrate. For example, someone special was born, or something wonderful happened, the more reasons the better. (And of course it should have some smart filtering system to remove stuff I'm not interested in.)

Furthermore, I would like to be able to personalize the "reasons to party" calendar with personal events in my life. Some of these I might even be willing to make publicly available (such as the first time in my life a teacher locked me out of a classroom).

If anyone knows of such a service, please let me know! Maybe it would be possible to adapt the Wikipedia "what happened today" service somehow?

Almost There!

In 2 weeks I'll be back home. I'm looking forward to see everyone! :-)
I'll be in Vienna until the 29th or so (and then go to Rome).

I hope I'll get all of my 20 plastic bag stamps before that. I only need 3 more! Every time I go food shopping to Kasumi I ask them not to flood me with plastic bags. Every time I do so, they stamp my card. Once I've collected 20 of those stamps they'll donate 100 Yen (that's about 75 cents) to the WWF. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, check out the post by the Sockenpabst (in German). Here are two pictures of my almost full stamp collection :-)
(The card has the size of a credit card.)



And here is the back side:



Here is a picture of another stamp collection from the same food store. I have no idea what it's good for, but I threw the same card away once, and got a new one the next time, so now I'm holding on to it (just so that they don't give me a new one).



I'm realizing now how many of those cards I have :-)
Here is a different one from the restaurant on the AIST site. We usually go to the cheaper cafeteria for lunch, but every time we go to the restaurant we get a stamp. I think once we collected 30 of them we get a free meal. Last time we went the lady was so nice to give me 5 stamps at once. She probably figured I wouldn't manage to collect all 30 in the time I'd be here anyway :-)



Btw, the title of the card is one of the few things I can read :-)
It says: "Restaurant, Point Card".

While I'm uploading pictures... here are two more. I think autumn is the most beautiful season in Japan. The red and yellow colors everywhere are much more intense than the pale white and pink cherry blossoms. (Both pictures taken within AIST.)

Scientology

Someone posted a Scientology educational video link on youtube, and someone dugg it up. To quote a comment someone wrote about it: "I'm looking at this more objectively though. In my personal opinion Scientology is batshit crazy, [...]".

Web 3.43

You haven't heard of Web 2.0 yet? Someone decided to give the Internet a version number. However, as everything in the Internet, also it's current version number is moving fast.

A straightforward approach to compute the current version of the World Wide Web is to query Google 99 times to get the estimated total results for all versions ("Web 0.1" to "Web 9.9" in version increments of 0.1) and compute the weighted average. There is a Google Soap API to do that very conveniently, even from within Matlab. The only drawback is that the results using the API are not as accurate as those you get when using the interface for humans. Anyway, the number I got was 3.43.

Inspired by Userfriendly.org :-)

Osutori

In Japanese Austria and Australia basically sound identical. I usually have to mention that I am from Europe, and that there are no Kangaroos where I come from. Sometimes it also helps mentioning Vienna or Mozart :-)

Anyway, seems as though there is finally a solution to the problem. Austria's name in Japanese will be changed from Osutoria to its original form: Osutori. Dropping the last "a" will make it sound different from Osutoraria (which is Australia's Japanese name).

There is more information at ORF.at (German). And Matsusaka has also sent me the official document (PDF, German and Japanese). However, this seems to be somehow unofficial and some are objecting to this change... anyway, I think it's a great idea.