“A sale piece is expected. Let’s hurry at a store hard.”
— Engrish from chrno.com...to reign in Hell
In a surprise announcement that has left fans reeling, Satan (aka Koharu Kusumi) is leaving Morning Musume and Hello!Project, at the tender age of 17. Like fellow “graduate” Erika Umeda, she’s announced plans to become a model; unlike the 18-year-old Umeda, however, she has a stack of popular photobooks and DVDs attesting to her solo popularity, so she’s guaranteed some initial success.
This is on top of the mass exodus of the grownups earlier this year, and the curiously-handled retirement of Kanna Arihara, so it’s been a rough year for H!P fans, and with star-pimp Tsunku bringing ever-younger girls (6? WTF?) into his stables, I suspect it’s a bit nerve-wracking for the surviving members as well.
[Update: pimp-blogging reveals that she didn’t jump, she was pushed. That should make both fans and fellow members even more nervous about the organization’s future.]
Cake Shavers?
Someone just sent out email to the company saying “free cake shavings in the break room”.
My first response: shouldn’t cake shavings be served in a paipan?
No reading class this quarter
Given the state of California’s finances, I had my fingers crossed that my usually-small Japanese reading class would survive the inevitable cuts, but it turns out it was canceled for an unexpected reason: high enrollment in other classes in the department. There’s a contractual limit in how much one instructor can support, and my class was taught by the only salaried professor. Her time is already paid for, but each part-time instructor is a new cost.
Not sure what’s going to happen next quarter. Enrollment typically drops significantly in Winter and Spring quarters, as students discover that Japanese is the wrong language to study if you’re just trying to meet the language requirement to transfer into a four-year school, but that may not be enough to reinstate the class. She’s going to try to restructure it as an online class, but I’m not sure how it would work out. The group dynamics are a large part of what made it work, with people bringing in a wide variety of material and working together to understand it, with her guidance and cultural insight.
And I had some really fun stuff prepped for this quarter, too…
Fear My Genius!
I just clicked on the new iTunes “Genius Mixes” button for the first time, and this is what came up:
"But what kind of fools are they?"
The illiterate kind, the unintentionally honest kind, or the “we’ll say anything to get your attention” kind?
What'cha gonna do...
…when they come for you.
(and, yes, it’s actually called Rubber Duck Project 2009, or, locally, アヒルプロジェクト2009; both searches will pull up some decent pictures)
Words to live by...
…briefly.
「ンガイ・ングアグアア・ブグ＝ショゴグ・イハア、ヨグ＝ソトホース、ヨグ＝ソトホース……」
「イグナイイ……イグナイイ……トゥフルトゥクングア……ヨグ＝ソトホース……」
「イブトゥンク……ヘフイエ――ングルクドルウ……」
An-du-torowa
Decpihering loanwords in Japanese can be a bit of a challenge. Today’s example is アン・ドゥ・トロワ, an-du-torowa. I don’t think I’d have gotten it if I hadn’t found a video clip of a song by that name.
