Disqus - Latest Comments for Jonadab

Re: Japan is Sinking! Or is It?

Jonadab — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 21:49:47 -0000

Japan is much too _vertical_ to sink easily. All those mountains. It would take one heck of a serious earthquake to sink all that. On the moment magnitude scale (what we used to call the "richter" scale) that would be... completely totally off the scale, to the point where it would make anything the scale can actually measure look like small children playing.

Re: The Things I Do Not Miss About Japan

Jonadab — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 06:52:35 -0000

My shoe size barely exists in America (it took me more than ten *years* to find a shoe that actually fits, and they're $160/pair), so I would just know going in that there would be no hope of buying shoes anywhere in Asia.

Re: The Things I Do Not Miss About Japan

Jonadab — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 06:49:14 -0000

I theoretically like bacon, but I don't like it enough to justify eating something that unhealthy, so I almost never eat it. (I have more of a problem with cheese. Also chocolate.)

Re: The Things I Do Not Miss About Japan

Jonadab — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 06:46:15 -0000

Just bring your own bottle of Dave's Insanity Sauce or whatever from the States.

Re: The Things I Do Not Miss About Japan

Jonadab — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 06:43:26 -0000

In the Midwest, there isn't any one food associated with Christmas, although some families have family traditions. In my family, we buy peppermint nougat in bulk.

Re: The Things I Do Not Miss About Japan

Jonadab — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 06:37:50 -0000

The last train runs at midnight? You poor dear. In most American communities, the last passenger train ran in the sixties.

Re: Why does Japan Drive on the Left Side of the Road?

Jonadab — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 09:11:18 -0000

In most American cars, the blinkers and the wipers are controlled with the same stick. You move the whole stick up or down to activate the blinkers, or you twist the end of it to activate the wipers. In some cases, you also pull the same stick toward you to toggle the high-beam headlights.

Re: Why does Japan Drive on the Left Side of the Road?

Jonadab — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 09:08:23 -0000

If you watch British television, you can easily come away with the impression that all of Europe drives on the left. (Most of us in the English-speaking world don't watch non-British European television, probably on account of language barrier issues and of course availability; but a lot of British TV shows are available in America, on cable, on DVD, at the library, etc.)

Re: Why does Japan Drive on the Left Side of the Road?

Jonadab — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 09:02:30 -0000

Fascinating. The BBC had me pretty much convinced that driving on the left was the near universal rule and driving on the right was an American thing. Those darned Brits.

Re: Japanese Dog Breeds And How To Get Them

Jonadab — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 06:47:41 -0000

I think the akita is a significantly more famous breed than the shiba, at least in America.

Re: The 7 Odd Things I’ve Missed About Japan

Jonadab — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 21:39:00 -0000

I have difficulty imagining that I would ever prefer a heated seat of any kind to a non-heated one, and that goes double for toilet seats. As for the spray option, I'm afraid that's way too... the only word I can think of here is "French"... so, yeah, way too French for my tastes.

Better water pressure in the shower would be nice, though.

Hot Coke... Hmmm.... How about room-temperature Coke? No, wait, how about room temperature flat caffeine-free diet Coke? With mayonnaise in it! Or, you know, not.

I've never had a chance to try real wasabi, because it's basically impossible to get in this part of the world. (Even in Japan a lot of wasabi is fake, but where I come from you're doing alright if you just get real soy sauce -- many stores only carry La Choy, which is to soy sauce roughly as Kraft singles are to cheese. Real wasabi is so rare here it may as well be fictitious.)

Re: These Words Are English, But You Won’t Understand Them

Jonadab — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 08:19:14 -0000

> Mansion as a block of flats is new to me.

The word "mansion" has a long and storied history. In Elizabethan English, for example, it just meant a place where somebody lived, even if it was a tumbledown lean-to shack. It was used much like the modern words "house", "home", maybe even "flat" or "pad", or especially "dwelling" -- and like "dwelling" it could also refer to the act of living in a place; in fact, that may have originally been the primary meaning.

The word "mansion" did not imply affluence until some time in the seventeenth century.

However, I'm pretty sure Japanese gets the word マンション from French. (English got it from Old French, several centuries earlier.)

Compare also "pension" versus ペンション, another case where both English and Japanese got the word from French and use it with quite different nuances.

Re: Dancing Mascots Take Over Japan, Break World Record

Jonadab — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 07:31:38 -0000

I have a question about all these mascots.

Is having a mascot for your town/company/team/promotion in Japan an obligatory thing that most people don't actually give a blind rat's cut-off tail about but everyone has to do anyway (like having a motto for US towns or having a Vision Statement in the US corporate world), or do the Japanese people actually get into all these mascots and care about them?

Re: American Football in Japan

Jonadab — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 07:55:01 -0000

If you'd asked me which country was second-best at football, I'd have guessed Canada, since it's actually pretty popular there. (They also have a Canada-specific variant, but the American-style game is almost as popular, popular enough that they sometimes call it "football" without a qualifying adjective.)

My second guess would've been Australia.

Re: Giant Squid, Butt Pillows, Hacker Cats, and More [Sunday News]

Jonadab — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 09:20:04 -0000

Eleven bucks a minute? I am in the WRONG business. (Unfortunately, I'm not nearly as cute, or female, or Japanese, as the pillow in the photo.) Do prostitutes even make that much? Lawyers? Plumbers? Politicians?

Re: Guns in Japan

Jonadab — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 11:16:31 -0000

Those "guns per capita" numbers look very wrong to me. In particular, I'm almost certain the number of guns per capita in America (overall) is less than 1, or at least not very much more than 1 (everywhere I've ever lived, it's closer to 0.1), and 88 is absurd. No place has anywhere near that that many guns per capita, not South Central L.A., not a military base during wartime, not a hunting lodge, not anywhere.

Re: 5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Major in Japanese (and 2 You Might Consider It)

Jonadab — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 21:56:22 -0000

Clearly the thing to do is to quadruple major in Japanese, all-grade music education, pre-med, and law, with a double minor in public speaking and quantum mechanics. Yes, you can get your bachelor's degree in only eleven years, and only three of your majors (plus one of your minors) will be completely worthless on the job market without a graduate degree! Yay!

Or, you know, you could just major in whatever you want and minor in something highly marketable, like IT. That works too.

Re: Japanese Weather Forecasts Warn You About Cockroaches, Beer

Jonadab — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 19:19:47 -0000

> A flyswatter for cockroaches?

These are probably Asian cockroaches. They're significantly different from the ones we have in (most of) the States. Among other things, they are more commonly seen outdoors than indoors, which would explain why the weather people started reporting on them. Also, they take to their wings more readily than American roaches. The Asian roaches were inadvertently introduced to southern Florida and have become an invasive species there. There's an old but fairly detailed article about them here:
http://www.miamiherald.com/...
(The author of that article mostly writes humor, but although this article has some humor in it, it's mostly straight up reporting.)

> I wouldn't be surprised if giant cockroaches

Actually, giant cockroaches are mostly found in Latin America, Africa, and, famously, Madagascar.

Re: Mayonnaise: Traditional Japanese Food

Jonadab — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 11:08:45 -0000

Ew.

Re: Death of a Constitution Writer, Botched Seppuku, World’s Worst Vacation, And More [Sunday News]

Jonadab — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 11:00:59 -0000

The ideal thing is probably to replace the apology with a statement to the effect of "No apology we could offer would change what has happened" and let it go at that. Then at least when people are still upset with you, they prove your statement correct.

Re: Death of a Constitution Writer, Botched Seppuku, World’s Worst Vacation, And More [Sunday News]

Jonadab — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 10:55:38 -0000

When I read this story, I had a gut feeling someone would make fun of it. It's not real sharp, but I knew someone would take a stab at it. People always make jokes about serious topics, anne frankly they need to stop. Can jew nazi how hurtful it is?

Re: Japan’s War on Fake Weed

Jonadab — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 10:01:56 -0000

Once, on a dare, when I was young and incredibly stupid, I crushed up a Smarties candy (which, if you're not familiar with the brand, is basically just pastel-colored sugar with maybe some citric acid for flavor) and attempted to snort it. The experience was not pleasant.

Re: Japan’s War on Fake Weed

Jonadab — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 09:52:20 -0000

I thought the situation here in the US, wherein the herbal supplement industry can sell pretty much anything that comes from a plant (as long as it's not on the short list of things that are specifically banned) and make any claims they want about what it does, was bad enough. But at least here we don't allow new *synthetic* drugs unless the producer goes through a regulatory approval process complete with multiple phases of clinical trials testing for both safety and effectiveness. Granted, every once in a while somebody finds a way to disguise a drug as something other than a drug (e.g. bath salts) and sell it openly on store shelves for a little while, but that never lasts very long before the police catch on. New laws are not required to ban new drugs: if it's clearly a (synthetic) drug and clearly has not been approved by the FDA, it's illegal.

Re: The Oldest Man in the World, Remote-Controlled Toilets, Election Results, and More [Sunday News]

Jonadab — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 09:22:19 -0000

This would actually be just about the ideal time for Japan to draft an entirely new constitution. The generation of people who were adults during WWII has just about expired -- those who are still alive are well into their nursing home years by now and would not have any major influence on the process, so a constitution drafted now could be largely untainted by the war its emperialism. The post-war constitution was necessary at the time, but at this point Japan has clearly joined and fully embraced the free world and is not in any imminent danger of falling back on old pre-San-Francisco habits. The time to draft a new constitution, a completely Japanese constitution, a constitution free of the legacy of the old emperial issues, is now.

Re: The Biggest Spelling Mistakes in Japanese

Jonadab — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 04:28:36 -0000

> I can think of a few times in English when a short
> and a long vowel sound makes a difference in meaning,
> but the differences aren’t usually that pronounced.
> They might just indicate past and present tense,
> like with “fed” and “feed.”

Wait, what?

No, this is wrong.

If you actually study English, you will find that we have hundreds of thousands of minimal pairs of completely unrelated words distinguished only by (our twisted, bizarre version of) vowel length.

Just a small handful off the top of my head:
add/aid, bad/bade, brad/braid, fad/fade, clad/clade, lad/laid/layed, mad/made/maid, pad/paid, rad/raid
red/read/reed/read, head/heed, bed/bead, said/seed, dead/deed, wed/weed
God/goad/good, cod/code/cawed/could, mod/mode/mood, nod/node/newd, odd/owed, rod/rode/rowed/rued, laud/lode/load/lowed/loud/lewd, quad/quod, sod/sewed, shod/shooed/shewed/showed, wad/wode/wood
fill/file, mill/mile, bill/bile, till/tile, dill/dial, gill/guile, pill/pile, rill/rile, will/while, still/style,
fell/feel, mell/meal, dell/deal, ell/eel, pell/peel, knell/kneel, sell/seal, shell/she'll, tell/teal, spell/spiel, well/weal/we'll, yell/ye'll