Coffee Flavored Jelly

It tastes like coffee.

道案内

Kids learn how to give directions starting in third grade, at least when I am teaching. It's funny because between second and third grade, there is some kind of magical change in their brains that lets them understand the difference between right and left. If you try to teach younger kids how to do it, they won't get it because they can't even do it in Japanese. I wonder what's up with that.

僕：じゃ，今日どうしようかな？
先生：えっ、分からん！　悪いけど、任せるといいなとおもったんだ。
俺：ああ、大丈夫。道案内やったことある？
教師：ないね。
私：まあ、そうやってええがね？
講師：はい、御願いします！ずーずー弁も上手だね！
わし：いや、そんなことない。まんだチョンボシしかできんガヤ。
先生：わけしなにおじいさんやにはなすな。
おら：いつも習っちょうね、横田で。
講師：そげ、そげ。一人でいい？　けわしけん。
僕：ええ、もちろん。じゃ、えくぞ！

This ridiculous conversation is fictional but approximated with extra Izumo dialect added. I'll be amazed if people can understand it.

Just Thinking

I think if you make a movie even tangentially about the Vietnam War, it is required by law that you include at least one (1) song by Creedence Clearwater Revival and one (1) song by the Rolling Stones. You'd better run through the jungle, anyway.

I ate bread with honey on it earlier today because last week a guy gave me some honey as a gift, which is awesome because it is pretty expensive here. I don't know if it always is, or if this is a result of the colony collapse thing. I don't know if honey is expensive in America, either, or if bees have gotten back to normal.

30 Rock used to be a lot better. The Office is also not as good as it had been, but the last episode with the entire office wasting the day voting on whether or not Hilary Swank is hot was brilliant. The answer is she has a good body but a weird man face.

Speaking of things that used to be better, I am trying to listen to Paul Simon's "Surprise." It is not good. The surprise is that he has this dude Brian Eno not producing, but providing a "sonic landscape." The unsurprising parts are that old dudes rarely make albums as good as they did when they were young and that the pretentiousness of an album containing "sonic landscape[s]" is rivaled only by its irritatingness. Just adding a bunch of electronic beats to pre-existing songs does not make them innovative or even particularly interesting.

One thing that is good is Bridge to Terabithia. Yes, I am aware that this is a kids' book/movie. But I liked the book when I read it a year or two ago, and I liked the movie when I saw it a couple weeks ago. I also know that it isn't really new or anything. But still, it's sad but perfect when the girl dies at the end. Oh, no, spoilers!

鰰

In this blog's grand tradition of posting pictures of fish that I eat, here are some more pictures of fish that I have eaten.


This is a hatahata, which is apparently sailfin sandfish in English. It's kind of hard to tell from the picture, but the skin is almost like a frogs, brown and spotty and very smooth. The body is very soft.

One thing I have learned from eating fish like all the time is that different fish are put together differently, and, as a result, come apart differently. Here's what I mean. To gut kisu, it works really well to cut down the ventral side and use the side of the knife to push the guts out. That also works fairly well for sanma, but not quite as well, as the intestines generally stick a bit. Aji, on the other hand, are all bony and it is much harder to gut them in that way. I don't really have a good method for them, but I haven't eaten any of those in a while. Renkodai are even worse like that. They're very spiny and bony and have hard scales, but I found that it's very easy to pull the meat up off the bones, like opening the fish up as if it were a book, and scraping the meat off from the scales. Then you just have a bunch of loose meat, which I think is good for making fish meatballs, but I couldn't find a recipe for that particular fish, so it was just experimenting. I think the key is the cavity (I forget the term) in which all the guts sit. In kisu and sanma, which are long, skinny fish, the organs are stretched out almost the length of the fish, making them kind of like hoses with fins. Renkodai and, as I found out tonight, hatahata have all the guts towards the front of the fish, right behind the head in a more sac-like cavity. So, for hatahata, which I found worked well was cutting right behind the head cross wise on the dorsal side, guillotine-style, then pulling on the head, which almost magically removed everything else with it. Fascinating stuff!

I found a recipe, which was really simple and followed it. All I did was batter them in a mix of flour, pepper, and a bit of salt (this is Japan, after all), and fry them, which was really quick. The yellow blob there between fish is ginger. 旨い！

On a related note, the counter for fish (at least fish that you are cooking) is 尾, bi. The character is usually read o on its own, and it means "tail." Watch out for sharks!

Travel

I know everyone has been waiting for Paris stuff, so here you go.



These are two of my three traveling companions. Red hat is Chelsea and white hat is Marisa, aka Ris, aka RZA, aka Marmot (that is just my name for her, but it is pronounced like the French mot, if you are wondering). For an exciting video of these two, look below.





And my final traveling companion, fake construction worker guy at the Eiffel Tower for some reason. I have no idea what that was there for.


This is what the Eiffel Tower would look like if you were standing pretty much right under it. This picture was taken by being pretty much right under the Eiffel Tower.


More pictures taken using "stand under the Eiffel Tower and look up" technology.

This picture answers the old question, "What if you built a Bois de Bologne" and nobody came? And there was also snow? It answers it thusly, "snow and trees, but not sideways like this in reality. Also there was a bum throwing stuff into some trees but he is not pictured in this answer."


My phone needs to be checked into Les Invalides because this camera angle is CRAZY. Who would build a sideways dome?

More of our star attraction, Mr. Eiffel's tower. Little known fact (unless you ever had any French class ever): when they first built the tower, everyone thought it was an eyesore. Now everyone loves it so much that they all buy keychains and horrible light up plastic replicas of it from Senegalse immigrants who will just keep offering more and more of them for a single Euro until you give in and buy dozens of them.


It's not such a bad Christmas tree, Charles de Brun. It just needs a little love. And to be put on the first floor of the Eiffel tower. And then we will close all the other levels so that all people can do is look at it. The top levels were closed when we went up, which I guess is our bad for going during bad weather. :-(




In this video, we can see the Eiffel Tower used for its secret actual purpose, as a lighthouse to prevent airplanes from running into the Eiffel Tower. If you listen very carefully, you can hear the very rare English dialect of French.




Here is that famous French political activism. These people were marching in support of the Gazans, I think (I got that from one of their signs, but I have no idea what they were saying). One person was carrying a sign that read (star of david) + US = (swastika), so maybe they were marching against US support of Israel, as well? Anyway, I guess there was some violence later on, but we only watched this for a few minutes before moving on. Also there was a McDonald's there.

Snow Geology

I know you want to see pictures of Paris. That is what Google is for. Actually, I'll get to that, but first this.

It has snowed at least a few hours a day for the last four days. It's snow madness, turning a fifteen minute commute into a nearly two hour Odyssey. On the plus side, it gives us a sort of temporary geology to look at until nature decides it's time for us to feel our feet again.


It's sideways, but hopefully you can make it out. There are very clearly different layers of snow, which I'm sure you could use to unravel the story of when it snowed and for how long, like looking at sedimentary layers of stone to tell when things were fossilized. The top layer is powder snow, which was falling even as I took the picture. The layer below seems compressed, maybe melting and refreezing? I think the rough looking part is from when they plowed the streets and left all the jumbled up snow on the side of the road, making uneven snow hills which people have dug little walkways like this one through.


Here again you can see the compressed snow near the bottom.


And here's the top of that same mountain of snow, no doubt freshly piled by snow plows, waiting to be conquered by some adventurous elementary schooler.


I have no explanation for how this works. That's a house, if you couldn't figure it out. The big white hook shape hanging off the side is just snow as far as I can tell. I don't know how it can resist gravity so well. I didn't think snow held together that well, especially without somebody there to pack it together.


This one's upside down. My new phone refuses to take pictures as I want, always changing the orientation without asking me. It's one of those snow trenches I mentioned earlier, but one of the walls seems to have collapsed. What's interesting is that it didn't collapse into a big pile of broken up snow, but rather two big balls of compacted snow. I'm guessing somebody did that, but I have no idea why one would. Just another mystery for science!

睦月

Making supply runs to the convenience store in the dead of night. A one man graveyard shift in a Japanese three day blizzard. I'm stocked up on black tea and artificial lemon drink. It's trench warfare against the common cold. There's fish and rice and all the miso soup you can drink to last through coming of age day. Daikon on salted pike, guts still in and bitter if you are a grandperson. Daikon in the soup, daikon for virility. Taste the umami.

Two shirts, to track suits, three pairs of socks, a pair of shorts, two gloves on each hand, three pairs of socks and it still feels like trenchfoot creeping up. Got wet clothes in front of a space heater steaming up the room and a towel wrapped around my head. Reading and writing and listening to Elvis. Cool biz Koizumi would be proud. An economy built on biking vegetables to the farmers' market fears black ice more than a global banking collapse.