Hey, you better check out my phlog. I was taking pictures in the temple grounds, and apparently some ghosts just walked right into the picture. Whaddya know...

Three posts in a day. Wow. I thought that was worth celebrating with one more post.

Just to say I want to look more into this thing I found on Dwight Friesen's blog.

"Sobornost is a Russian Orthodox social church theory"

Ok. I am sufficiently inspired. And I am in a internet cafe with a lot of time on my hands. so...

That's the text I am using these days. I decided to go for it - learn kanji. Kanji are the Chinese characters used in Japanese writing. I guess I should break that down a little more: reading Japanese is really hard. It consists of two alphabets (three if you count the roman one) plus kanji, which is not an alphabet, but pictographs, pictures that represent a word. So to read a newspaper, you have to be able to read both the alphabets, plus about 2000 of the kanji. The alphabets are no big deal, we did that in the first couple months here. But kanji! Well, many just assume they will never get it and leave it at that.

There was a time. about two months ago, when I thought i would be one of those guys who may never learn kanji. But a friend of mine stumbled across this system that he got all evangelical to me about. He was convinced that it is absolutely life-changing in regard to kanji learning. Always a sucker for evangelism, I checked out the system and now find myself spending about two hours a day at it.

I don't exactly know why I am able to do that. I am not known for my discipline, but for some reason I am feeling highly motivated to do this. And I guess it is basically because of the success. The way I used to try and learn kanji, I would just learn a bunch and then have them fall out of my brain in a week. But this guy has come up with a way that makes the kanji stick in my head like that last grain of rice in the rice bowl.

He does it with really strange stories. Remember in school using strange acronyms to make stuff stick in your memory, like roygbiv for the colors of the rainbow? Well, it's kind of like that. Here, I will demonstrate, sitting right here in the internet cafe. First, I've gotta find a kanji appropriate for explaining. Just a sec...

Ok. I couldn't find one, so I am drawing one on a napkin. Now I have to mail it to the phlog. Hold on...

Ok. So here it is:



So, this is how he breaks this one down. The top part there, the part that looks like a cross with one arm lopped off, that is a magician's wand. And the square, that is a mouth. So the mouth with the wand on top means fortune telling. Now add four little dots underneath, and that is that kanji for "spot". See, because this fortune teller looks into the fire and tells your fortune from the spots she sees in front of her eyes.

Now that just sounds like the dumbest things, doesn't it. But that is actually the point. the stories get a lot weirder than that, but it seems like the weirder the are, the less likely you are to forget the kanji.

I learned 200 in the last two weeks. Previous to that I was at about 40 in two years. I plan for another hundred next week.

2000 by Christmas???

Anyway, if your thinking of getting born again into the world of Japanese reading, the name of the book is Remembering the Kanji by a professor named James Heisig.

I haven't been blogging with any consistency for a while now (granted there is no rule that says I must) so there is likely not a lot of people to see this recommendation, but I thought I would jot it down anyway.

For anyone who has a freaky somewhat inexplicable attraction to Russia (as I do), this guy is living in Moscow right now and having some great times that he writes about in detail.

In fact, maybe he will inspire me to write in more detail about some of my experiences here. Maybe.

Great day at the beach yesterday. We went to a place on the Japan Sea called Wakasa. Nice place but the sand was a little gritty. I still have yet to find a beach with sand as nice as that at Grand Beach. Amazing little jewel that Lake Winnipeg...

And it is hot and HUMID here. Like you wouldn't believe. We hide in the air conditioning and go to the beach or the river. And the week is going to get rough when it comes time to put on a tie. The Japanese should never have taken on western modes of business dress. It just doesn't fit the summer here. If we did it real Japanese style, we would all be wearing yukatas, which is almost like wearing pajamas all day. Ii ne...

Check it out. 80's t-shirts... Cool.

Was in Canada. Saw Farenheit 911. The following isn't my opinion, but I thought it was an interesting one...

I have been defending Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 from the criticism in mainstream and conservative circles that the film is leftist propaganda. Nothing could be further from the truth; there is very little left critique in the movie. In fact, it's hard to find any coherent critique in the movie at all.

The sad truth is that Fahrenheit 9/11 is a bad movie, but not for the reasons it is being attacked in the dominant culture. It's at times a racist movie. And the analysis that underlies the film's main political points is either dangerously incomplete or virtually incoherent.

But, most important, it's a conservative movie that ends with an endorsement of one of the central lies of the United States, which should warm the hearts of the right-wingers who condemn Moore...

...Is the administration of George W. Bush full of ideological fanatics? Yes. Have its actions since 9/11 been reckless and put the world at risk? Yes. In the course of pursuing those policies, has it enriched fat-cat friends? Yes.

But it is a serious mistake to believe that these wars can be explained by focusing so exclusively on the Bush administration and ignoring clear trends in U.S. foreign and military policy. In short, these wars are not a sharp departure from the past but instead should be seen as an intensification of longstanding policies, affected by the confluence of this particular administration's ideology and the opportunities created by the events of 9/11...

...The claim that Fahrenheit 9/11 is a conservative movie may strike some as ludicrous. But the film endorses one of the central lies that Americans tell themselves, that the U.S. military fights for our freedom. This construction of the military as a defensive force obscures the harsh reality that the military is used to project U.S. power around the world to ensure dominance, not to defend anyone's freedom, at home or abroad...