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For gamers only...2

The new Mario Kart is scheduled to come out next Spring. Be ready to see me doing alot of this. There is good news and bad news that comes with this game. Most of it has to do with the internet.

The next Mario Kart will have worldwide online playing capapbilities, courtesy of the Wii. If implemented like the worldwide system in place for Mario Kart DS, this means no irritating chat boxes, just opponents recommended to you based on your skill level, and the choice of picking out anyone you want to play against that you know who happen to be online at the same time, or ever random strangers, I would assume. This is good news, in that it will allow me to have some serious competition, and hone my *strongbad voice* "skills of a kartist." The bad news is probably bad news for my friends, because it's already annoying enough to play against me since I tend to shoot down anyone who tries to drive away with the dreaded green shells (see diagram 1). With the option of playing against the best in the world, I'll have a chance to have more lively targets--nay! Be hunted as an inferior driver in a way I haven't for ages. And this is good news because I need to be humbled at Mario Kart. I'm aware that I have quite the inflated ego over it. So I'm happy and sad for the future end of my reign as the best Kart-sniper in my known world of about 15 years of playing the series of Kart video games by Nintendo.

The other good news is we can all play against the folks I know with Wiis all over the place. Nathan in Western WA, Sean in AK, Nate in Arkansas, etc. Not sure how many karts at once will be possible. Probably 8 at a time, on two system, or a mix of any number from different places, or a mix with a number of computer players. This could be bad news, however, if they force you to always play with 8 humans in a race, that could take away from the fun quite a bit, I am sure. The other possibility is that they will allow up to 8 players on a single console. We already know this is possible from the Bust-A-Move game developed for the Wii, that allows 4 Wiimotes and 4 regular controllers at once. putting 8 screens on a TV at once however....is difficult. No word to implementation of this as of yet, if it is even possible.

Diagram 1: Another superior driver's dreams
smashed by yet another tactical green shell
snipe, courtesy of Bowser.
(picture liberated from TheOnion.com)

Change of Direction

This blog is now going to be highlighting the things in my life post-japonic. However, there is bound to still be Japanese influence in many of these things, so I'll be bringing up alot of things connected in one way or another to Japan in nearly ever last post, I am certain. I'll be pointing it out for you all too.

The first thing I'd like to share with you all are the works of three of my favourite artists. One is Japanese, one half-japanese, and one completely un-Japanese. They are, respectively:

Shina Ringo: a Jazz artist from Tokyo, Japan. She is know as being quite strange, even among musicians or jazz performers. She has done covers of songs in at least 6 languages, which is 5 more than most people from her continent ever manage in the music industry. Not only that, she does them well, with pronuciation that defies the idea that being Japanese makes foreign pronuciation unattainable, as many on the subcontinent seem to believe (or fear. People will believe things they either wish to be true or fear...Wizard's First Rule, didn't you know? But I digress.) Shina can play almost every instrument I can think of in the Jazz world, and has written and recorded music from not only jazz, but also soft/hard/alternative rock, some strange military marches turned cute (I know, it's strange), piano pieces, and plenty of other genre-defying creations of her own. Not only does she have an incredible jazz voice, she also can play most of her instruments and is a great writer, so she's basically a one-woman musical army. Recently, what with being a mother, a full time composer, full time musical performer, and just being highly in demand for her time she decided to call alot of it quits and just join a rock band. It's still rock unlike any other due to her influence as the group's singer, and she is still part of the writing process, but it's transformed her style in new and interesting ways, although it isn't as various as it was when she was on her own. In any case, the name of her new group is "Tokyo Jihen" Which roughly translates into "The Tokyo Incidents" in English.

The second artist, Jacob Wellman, was actually a roomate of mine for a year. You know how people will talk about "deep" art? Well, Jake himself is alot like his art. We used to say that there was a deep Jake, but that beyond that was a "deeper" Jake, and that there was, quite probably, a deeper Jake under that. His works always fascinated me, because although they generally hold no recognizable shapes as representations of 2d or 3d objects in the form of a scene, his instead generally use shapes and colours that have a "feeling" that is almost impossible to explain. At times, he would bring works back to the dorm, and I would look at them and sort of "see" his experience. I could look and tell him the emotions I was feeling expressed in the piece, and even see the influence of things such as him having been raised in very urban areas, dispite the fact that there literally were NO shapes that the eye would encounter outside of the creations of man. But no matter how expressive his paintings are about life as Jacob Wellman, they still embody a sense deeper than what it is to be human: they are about being itself--what is is to be a creature on this Earth. This may be related to his beliefs in Zen Buddhism. His blog that he recently created to share just a few of his hundreds of sketches, paintings, and other more 3-dimensional works, can be found here.

Finally, I have no idea where this guy came from, but I recently found this selection of art online. Although some of his other stuff doesn't do anything at all for me, I would still suggest his crayon-carving art for viewing, if not for attempting. I would have broken (and this is just an approximate number) 351,492 crayons by the time I could have done this myself.

Approximately.

In home-country....

Well, I've been back in the U.S. for almost two months now. I didn't have any real problems readjusting at first, except to all the white people. That was odd for me, dispite my being raised in a 99% white community! Also, when I went to go get a doctor's appointment, I realized that our insurance system in the U.S.A. is also far behind. It not only causes rates to rise, it also usually is inadequate for many things. Goverment instituted insurance in Japan is a blessing, from all I saw. Other than this...real serious culture shock. Interestingly enough, I feel comfortable, perhaps MORE comfortable being surrounded by people speaking languages at speeds (or in dialects) I can't understand hardly at all. So it's good to be back at GU. I'll be finished in another year from now.

I had a good surprise this last week: it turns out that two of my students from my favourite class I taught at KUIS (Screen English) have recently arrived to do the ESL program that my MA/TESL program is intertwined with.

One of them is Kenji, who I mentioned in a much earlier post on my students. He's quite ready for this sort of program, although he has a long ways to go to finish it.

The other student, Miki, is also a good student, but due to some of her less-motivated friends in the classroom, she rarely met my fullest expectations. However, I think she'll do well here.

I was planning on taking both of them out to Idaho for the weekend, but things didn't work out; Miki has a group presentation to prepare for over the weekend. She sounded eager to go, so I'll probably just make another trip next weekend with her, if she is comfortable with that. She may want Kenji near for linguistic/common-culture support, although she will not need it. She doesn't know that she doesn't yet though!

Busy

Quite busy, actually! I managed to snag a "part-time" job assessing a pronunciation test that the university has made mandatory for many students. They are paying me 500 yen per test evaluation. They expect it to take a while, since it can be difficult for native speakers of English to assess non-native pronuncation (but the university wants to know how their students are pronouncing English, so having genuine marks for ever last English sound is important to the institution). I however, have taken no less than 4 upper- and graduate-level courses that studied phonetics, and I was trained brutally by a Finish man that I cannot thank more than enough for his well-meaning, difficult training in SLP (Speech Language Pathology, a horrid term).

I have finished most of the tests in under 6 minutes, on average, and thus I am making close to $40/hour. With my lifestyle, that essentially means that I can easily earn as much as I spend in a month--in five 3-hour days! So now that I landed the seasonal dream-job, I of course have to work as much as I can until the folks arrive here. At my current rate, I believe I can finish a grand total of around 240 evaluations during regular school hours, with interuptions for a few free trips that have been offered to me by my colleages and business connections that I have gathered here in Japan.

Yes, Adam just said "business connections" and that may be the last time you hear it from me! It's really too bad that this is only seasonal work at the end of the (Japanese) school year, Otherwise I could pay for a reasonable portion of my school at Gonzaga while attending, if I could only find such a job in the USA. I have to face it though; chances are I will never make this much money again in my life, and if I do it won't be something that I have such an ease at in doing the task as is the case with phonetics (my favourite part of language studies and the focus of this job).

So anyways, I'm going to try to get Tsune in on some kind of activity with us, maybe like USJ (Universal Studios Japan, which opened it's new roller coaster TODAY) or something like it! I STILL haven't seen the guy since he homestayed with us in the US! He lives about 3 hours (almost 4) away from me, but our schedules don't normally line up.

Well, that's it for me for now. I need to get food; I've only been eating about 2 meals per day because of my schedule. Big meals though. I better go make myself sick of everything I like to eat here before I leave so I won't miss it as much now.

My first visitor

Sean Simpson--one of the few guys I formed a very long-lasting bond with during my undergraduate years at EWU--is coming all the way from Alaska to visit and travel a little bit of Japan with me. Since I am housing and probably feeding him alot of this time, as well as being the translator (since he only took a year of Japanese many years ago himself and has forgotten almost everything) he has decided to pay for hotel for a 2-day trip to Tokyo on his way out. So I'm going to go ahead and do that! This will also help pave the way for our trip a month later to Tokyo. Hopefully all goes well. I have traveled Kansai extensively now, and I haven't had any REAL problems getting around at all. Things are more-or-less logical, except for the maps and the strange ticketing machines. You kinda have to know the kanji names for where you are going, unfortunately! You also have to know the name of the lines in some cases, which can be confusing too. So I will be heading to Shin-Kobe to pick up Sean tomorrow, and if all goes well picking him up with limited contact capabilites, then that is rad. If not...well, we'll get it worked out, and hopefully it isn't too painful for any of us. Wish me luck!

UNESCO

So, I forgot to mention UNESCO (one of the groups I have been working with on the weekends and odd-days to help bring understanding of the poor living situations in any number of places around the world) My part is...well, they want me there as a representative with "alot of education" (few people have even started an MA program here, let alone finished one) and part because I am an English teacher, and we try to teach that English is a good international language to these kids at a young age (even though the system for some reason doesn't support learning of English until they are around 12, and then, poorly). I guess a third but sadly neglected part of their use for me is as a cultural entity, the "C" in UNESCO. But, it's the Japanese. Culture isn't seen as being as important of a factor...helping others and spreading awareness of physical and economic troubles is, however. So it is definitely a good cause. I got a video interview recently on one of those, but...I can't find it online. I DID find an interesting thing about "homecountry"--USA (pronounced "OO-Suh")--and...well...my Grandfather's "homecountry"--Sweden(pronounced "swee-den"). The educational statistics online from the UNESCO analysis points out that only 10% of spending in Sweden is towards education, while around 95% of all people of eligible age from pre-school all the way though teritiary (college) school are currently enrolled in school. Territiary has the lowest score at 80%. That's still really high. Oh, and they have a 10-1 student-teacher ratio.

The US has meager scores by comparison...at every. age. We average out more like 80%. Weakest in preschool and college by percentage enrollment. Also, we spent (in 2004) roughly 17.4 percent of all our spending on Education. Our 15-1 student teacher ration average doesn't seem so good there, suddenly. Also, I think that that one must be somewhat mislead by preschools in the US, since we certainly don't achieve 15 in a class in most schools that I have heard of. 20 is much more common. And 30 isn't uncommon either. In any case, that was a bit of an eye-opener for me.

So yes. I forgot to mention it, but being that I work for UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Outreach), yes, I am technically a part time UN employee. I appologize for leaving out this little tidbit of information from you all, I just realized tonight in reflection that I had never once mentioned my employ "at the UN."