しあわせ

My friends Frank Chickens have become the obscure outsider candidate in a Rage Against The Machine style attempt to subvert the Fosters Edinburgh Comedy God Award public vote. It all started with a rant by Stewart Lee at the organisers where he mentioned the Chickens as possibly the most obscure act of the past 30 years. (They were nominated for a Perrier Fringe Award in 1984). Now it seems to have gained traction, via twitter and elsewhere, and the Chickens are currently number one in the online poll! Let’s keep them there. They are nice guys and would quite like to win an award.
In the spirit of Mr Splashypants –
Vote now – Vote often – Spread the word!

––update 01Sep10––
They won!
Yay for the skewed results of Internet voting!
I could hear the clenching of teeth in the Foster’s PR’s statements about the win.

Two years ago mixi started requiring a Japanese email address in order to sign up to mixi. It seems that what they are doing is filtering for undesirable domains. Hence google mail etc are being barred, Japanese keitai are not.
Koichi at Tofugu has found an apparent crack in mixi’s filters. dot-edu domain addresses are not being blocked. (for the moment). Which is good news if you have a .edu email address. He has even found a way to get a .edu address via an Australian site. Details can be found on Tofugu.
Apparently (I haven’t checked) .ac.uk addresses work as well.
You also don’t need an invite to join mixi anymore according to Tofugu. But play nice please; mixi is different from Facebook et al. and the social conventions around friend requests are different.
I wouldn’t liken it to the Black Ships yet. No one is forcing mixi to open up (and no-one should really). More like some Jesuits being snuck in.

I got a nice email from the author of futurefire, a blog about Japanese study written in German, so I went to check out her site.
I can’t read German but I’m sure it would be useful if you can. As you might expect from someone studying design the graphics are interesting. Check out the article on a re-design of the Tokyo subway map and one on furoshiki.
Also have a look at thephotographs on Wanda’s main site.

A good friend of mine, MiCAさん, has opened her brand new online fashion and accessory store, Regentag.
In Japan it’s customary at a shops opening for people to send large flower arrangements, and for the complex relationships and levels of patronage to kick in in supporting the new enterprise. To be honest I’m not exactly sure how it works.
But I thought I’d write this post and encourage readers at least to go and have a look, maybe give her a moral boosting blip on her site statistics. The merchandise isn’t the usual tech stuff I’d be interested in but is much more girly jewellery and accessories. I do like the colourful slippers/shoes (which I doubt would fit me!), and the bottle holders look very useful too.

So drop in and have a look.
I wish MiCAさん all the best in her new business.
よろしくお願いします。

The browser of choice for learners of Japanese has to be Firefox. Maybe because it’s logo is inspired by Godzilla! I resisted it for a long while because I quite liked Omniweb. Since Omniweb stopped development was in a period of slow development/on the back burner and caused my system to go to a crawl I looked at Firefox again. The only complaint I have is Firefox doesn’t support the Mac systemwide contextual menu.

The enormous plus of Firefox is the add-ons.
Read the rest of this entry »

I came across this film today on Japan Probe. It reminds me a bit of “The Queen’s Classroom” except this is a real look inside a classroom in Japan’s primary school system.
The original 涙と笑いのハッピークラス―4年1組命の授業 was made by NHK in 2003. It follows a year in Mr. Kanamori’s 4th grade class. It is very different from the western classes I know of. Not least because of the teacher’s relationship to the children, the discussion of matters such as death, the group solidarity, and the willingness of children to write.
The video on YouTube, Children Full of Life, is CBC’s version that is subtitled and has an English commentary. It’s well worth watching before it inevitably gets taken down.

(But for the gold standard in fly-on-the-classroom-wall documentaries search out Etre et Avoir)