TheLeong.com

I made the mistake this evening of turning on the TV. As I was flipping through the channels, I landed on NHK, the national public station. NHK is a lot different from traditional PBS stuff we see in the US, primarily because people actually watch it. There are, however, a lot of trash programs on the station, including educational ones. I think I’ve complained before about my intense hate for the English educational shows on Japanese TV. Tonight may have been the worst I’ve seen, primarily because of this mega flamboyant possibly transvestite foreign teacher:

Yikes is right. I’ve uploaded some poor-res video clips of this show on Youtube. Links are at the end of this post. You can probably imagine how freakishly strange this “guy” sounds, but it’s even worse than that. Please listen for yourself. Although he looks like Mimi from The Drew Carey Show, his voice is much, much higher.

The show is part of the Koukou Kouza series (NHK高校講座), which seems to have all kinds of lessons in different subjects targeted at high school students. I guess this show is actually for retarded high school students, because they have a teacher who speaks around 1 word a minute, and has to resort to extreme body and facial movements to keep your attention as he tries to get a full sentence out. Speaking of retarded high school students, check out the third video I uploaded from this show; not only do the kids speak English like they have speech impediments, but the conversation has no real logical flow either. The entire show is sentence repetition and basic conversations, which all in all isn’t that bad. My main beef with the show was the foreign host, who acts more like a clown that a teacher and doesn’t sound natural at all. If you spoke like that to a real native speaker, they’d laugh at you and walk away.

Of course I understand that you have to speak slowly and clearly for learners of English to understand you; I do it on a daily basis. However, this guy takes it over the top and deserves to be punched in the face for the way he acts. Most high school students don’t need to be spoken to this slowly. The students on the show, for example, spoke a lot faster and don’t need him breaking up every word into its own galaxy. Stop patronizing these people. I worry when I think about people actually watching these shows and thinking they’re going to learn how to speak English from someone like Mimi on TV here.

This guy’s name is Brian Wistner. After doing some hardcore research, by which I mean 1 page of Google search results, it seems as if this guy teaches English at some Christian college in Tokyo, and has also co-authored a book on taking TOEIC. Let’s hope for the sake of his customers and students that his on-camera persona is some kind of self-degrading joke, and he doesn’t really act, speak, or write like he does on the show. Something tells me that’s not the case though. I still can’t stand how pretty much every foreign co-host of these English shows on Japanese TV is a major toolbag. Yes, I said co-host, because I have yet to see a program that is hosted by a lone foreigner. There’s almost always a Japanese person there to lead the action, and that Japanese person usually speaks perfect English without acting like a high-school drama club reject. Hey NHK, here’s an idea: ditch the crap foreigners and just let these Japanese people host the shows.

Here are some clips of tonight’s show, in case you’re curious as to why this stuff annoys me so bad. I used my camera to take video off the TV, then posted them to YouTube, so obviously the quality is terrible. You can still watch them though.

• Clip 1 – Watch Mimi-sensei spell out a sentence as if he were teaching a dog how to drive a Jeep.
• Clip 2 – Another one!? Now he goes and talks to some Australian woman. This is the most awkward conversation using What’s up ever recorded on camera.
• Clip 3 – Since the program was so awful, the kids didn’t learn anything. She’s hungry. Heading home now. Pork chop sandwiches? Duuuuuur.

My first blog post from the “new” Blogger, which is out of Beta. I was hesitant, but so far so good. None of the new features really add anything for me, although adding labels/tags to my posts is intriguing. Anyway, nothing got erased and nothing exploded, so in that way I am satisfied with the upgrade. On to tonight’s short story.

I got off the computer last night at almost 2:30AM and layed in bed watching some Arrested Development. I fell asleep at some point, and remember waking up soon after thinking the building was shaking. I couldn’t tell if it was really that, or maybe like a neighbor’s washing machine or something. Either way, I shrugged it off, shut off my TV, and went to sleep for the night. I completely forgot about the incident until today at work when my co-worker Matt asked if I felt an earthquake last night. I first said no, then realized that I probably did, and corrected myself. Matt also barely felt it, and we were happy to find out that neither of us are insane (at least not earthquake insane). So yes, there was an earthquake last night and I barely woke up for it. At least this time I felt it. Since coming here, there have been at least 3 earthquake incidents that I apparently slept though, only finding out about them from students or co-workers the following day. Most of them are very weak, so I guess not feeling them isn’t too bad. I have no idea why they seem to always happen at night though; is there a geological reason for that? But yeah, I guess my first real earthquake experience a few years ago here was a bit more interesting and stronger, but nowadays it’s nothing special.

And now, reading news online after work per my usual routine, I see that the small tremor I felt last night was actually a much stronger earthquake in Shizuoka, then Tokyo, and then I suppose by the time it crossed Tokyo Bay and hit good old Goi, it was much weaker. Here’s a link to the CBS News article on it.

It’s interesting for me to look through my counter statistics for this webpage. I can see from where and when people are visiting, and other random details like that. Aside from the random visits I get from places like Malaysia and Indonesia, a lot of friends and I think people I know but haven’t talked to in a while, years even, are visiting my site. Did you know that if someone finds my site through a Google or other search engine query, I can see exactly what they were searching for? Very interesting indeed. With that, and the location/city the visitor is from, a lot of times I have a pretty good guess of who it is. So yeah, if you’re visiting my site, even randomly, you should leave a blog comment or drop me an e-mail to say Hey.

Almost exactly one week from now, I’ll be getting off a plane in Chicago, awaiting my fight to Tokyo to start AEON life. Well technically AEON life starts with a week-long training session up in Omiya, which from what I’ve heard and read, is about the worst part of the whole AEON experience. I’m going to do my best of living through it, although if it’s that bad, I’m sure I’ll be blogging about it later. I’m supposed to at least act like I’m paying attention, but since most of it will probably be stuff like “how to ride the trains” and ‘basic conversational Japanese,” I’ll likely spend the entire training session trying to sneak my DS into the training rooms and playing without being noticed. Blanchard will be there the same time as me, so I’ll at least have someone to hang out with. Hopefully we’ll be lucky and the other AEON trainees will be tolerable. There can’t be many; I’m guessing our entire training class will be less than 10. If anyone asks the trainers if the JR trains are “choo-choo trains” or if the “stations are equal distance apart from each other,” I will most likely jump on the table and start shooting bolts of lightning out of my hands. Nicknames will be given, I’m sure.

I need to finish up my baby bottle work/report by Monday, then I’m done with that completely. I have been pretty lazy, as predicted, since coming back from Bloomington. Spent longer than planned on Sunday playing Guitar Hero and hanging out with everyone in Wilkie’s basement. Stopped in Cloverdale on the way back and had dinner with Macie. Came back here to St. Louis and resumed my life, which is pretty much waking up every day before 9AM, watching a lot of TV (ER is such a great show, damn), and otherwise being pretty vegetable-like.

So I’ve been looking at and playing with Flickr lately, and it seems to be a really awesome system for storing, looking at, commenting on, and sharing photos. I’m considering using it as the photo system for this site, in part because it will be easier, in part because then more people can see it, in part because then you’ll be able to comment on individual pictures, and primarily because the way I do it now, editing HTML code, is a huge pain in the butt.

I think I’ll be able to make my Pictures pages look pretty close to what I have now, with Flickr providing the strip of images on the column of thumbnails. I could even be nice and copy the descriptions into a second column so it will look almost identical to the current setup. The big difference will be, when you click on a thumbnail, instead of opening a window with the larger image, you will be taken to a Flickr page. What do you guys think of this (all 1 of you reading this)? Does anyone think I should keep doing it the way I do it, or should I go with the fad and use Flickr? I’ll probably do a Flickr-based pictures page sometime this week. You guys can tell me what you think then.

Oh ya, if you’re on Flickr, my user ID is SkullCorp. Add me as a friend if you have a Flickr account.

I’m not completely sure how this or when this works, but you can get the Atom Sitefeed for my blog at:
http://www.theleong.com/blog/atom.xml
The only thing I know for sure this works for is the My Google, which lets you add different sections and things to your main Google site. Right now it looks like if you add my sitefeed, you can see the titles of my posts. So go ahead and add me to your My Google page or whatever you use Atom feeds for (I think it’s kind of like RSS). Then you’ll know for sure when I decide to update this baby.

Back in Bloomington. And yes apparently staying up until 6AM every day for the past week or so has officially ruined my sleep schedule, and I am sitting here in my nice Bloomington pad, 6AM, for some reason not feeling like going to sleep although I have absolutely nothing to do right now. I was feeling a little tired earlier around 2, but why go to sleep when I can watch TV and repair a Red Dragon Megazord?

Partially due to the boredom (not a bad thing) and lack of things to do at home while on break, I’ve become addicted to reading peoples’ blogs. I guess I can’t really say addicted, because I haven’t read that many, but I like to read peoples’ blogs (people I know, primarily) more often now. I don’t have as much of a hankering for reading strangers blogs, because they don’t seem as interesting to me, but I think I’m going to try and read peoples blogs more frequently from here on. YOU are obviously one step ahead of me and are already reading mine. Just some ramblings from a guy who should go to sleep soon. Oh yeah, speaking of blogs, I like comments on mine, because it makes me feel like this has a point/interaction. Use it like a discussion forum. Topic: what is your favorite type of cheese?

Obviously being awake this late is having some kind of effect on my train of thought. Anyways, in the past few hours, I’ve actually ran through my head two or three different “topics” that I could write blog entries about. I don’t always plan stuff out too much before I write on here, which is why my blog is pretty random and all over the place. Nick, of course, has an ongoing list of 30389 topics that he narrows down in a fashion similar to the Academy Awards nomination process. My problem is that I think of a good number of ideas, but am too lazy to sit down and write about them. Either that or I decide that it won’t be a good article (or there won’t be enough to write) and abandon it that way. Just off the top of my head of what I can remember, some so-called “discarded” blog ideas from the past few weeks have been:

• similarities between hardcore anime otaku and sports fans
• college is pretty much a waste of time if you don’t actually get experience in something that will be applicable in the real world
• saw a CNN spot on some hippy school in Chicago. STOP RAISING HIPPIES
• i love Dragon Ball
• Kishidan is 10 years old somehow, and they are still awesome
• semester outlook (I’ll prolly get around to this)

Feel free to borrow those ideas and develop them into some quality blog posts/newspaper articles/pop group songs for yourself; I’d love to see them.

I got my JET confirmation letter (they got my stuff), grades, 2 bills, and a reimbursement check from Sears in my mailbox. Also a bunch of ads. Overall, not the frightening overflow of mail I expected from being out of town for almost 3 weeks. But it’s good to be back; this is going to be a sweet semester. But for now, I must sleep. I’m going to forget what daylight looks like.