…they turn up in the oddest places.

(via Japundit)

The word for the day is 頭皮. Why? Because that’s the stumper that Kakitorikun threw at me today. [yes, this means that I’m still working though the 3rd grade vocabulary drills; work, WoW, and other study methods have slowed down, but not eliminated, my progress…]

The hint was: 「あたまをおおうあたまのかわ」, which at least confirmed that it was a literal combination of the two characters meaning “head” and “skin”, unlike the same lesson’s 皮肉. I’m not sure how you get “sarcasm” out of skin+meat, but at least the word is in my dictionaries.

頭皮 is not. It’s not in my WordTank (not even in the J-J section), it’s not in my printed dictionaries (not even The Compact Nelson), nothing. Edict and its derivatives are the only things that list it. So, here we have a word that’s common enough to put into children’s training software, but too rare to be worth mentioning in an electronic dictionary intended for native speakers. I’m not surprised that my student J-E dictionaries don’t have it, but Nelson’s usually pretty good.

Oh, the other study method that’s taking up some of my time? I’m watching Sentou no Musume during my daily workout. Lots of rapid casual speech with no subtitles, but the story is straightforward, the comedy is largely visual, and the acting is, um, “accessible”.

[Update: while I was in Kinokuniya tonight, I looked up 頭皮 in several printed J-J dictionaries. It wasn’t in any of them, and while I did find it in a few E-J dictionaries, it wasn’t in the matching J-E section.]

[Update: Kanji Sonomama has it.]

Kei Yasuda, former member of Morning Musume:

[Update: Her talents are not suited to certain other genres. Oof.]

[Update: replaced the defunct youtube link]

The Windows Genuine Advantage servers, used to validate your Windows install, are down. Unfortunately, if you can’t reach them, WGA assumes you’re a software pirate and deactivates.

Under XP, this prevents software updates. Under Vista, once you’re marked invalid, rebooting will disable OS features, including the Aero Glass user interface that was one of the flashiest features. And you can’t get any of it back until they fix the servers, which have been down for about 12 hours now. I don’t know what it does to Office…

Meanwhile, MS tech support has been terribly confused, giving out advice that assumes you’re an idiot or a pirate. They seem to be getting the word now, but some of them have told users to try again on Tuesday (!).

Some people are assuming that nobody’s working on it, because Microsoft is closed on weekends. WGA PM Phil Liu responds.

Quite by accident, I just noticed that a number of Apple-supplied Dashboard widgets on my MacBook were running under Rosetta. Specifically, Flight Tracker, People, Phone Book, Translation, and Unit Converter; the others with plugins had universal binaries.

I did use the Migration Assistant to preserve everything from my old PowerBook, but that shouldn’t have overwritten system-supplied widgets that were already present on the target machine. But maybe it did. Or else my MacBook shipped with some PowerPC cruft that hasn’t been caught in the last four OS updates.

An interesting note is that the PowerPC-only version of the Unit Converter widget is only localized for English and Japanese, while the universal version adds about a dozen more, despite the Info.plist file claiming that they’re both version 1.2.1.

…and if he wins, you’ll be able to check them out for yourself. It seems a Florida man took some upskirt photos, got arrested for voyeurism, and now his attorney insists that he didn’t break any laws, because there’s no expectation of privacy in a public place.

It’s true that US law generally agrees that you can photograph anything that’s visible from a public place, but there are already a number of exceptions, and I suspect that shoving your camera into a private place is one of them. This argument might fly if she had deliberately exposed herself or worn a skirt so skimpy that a reasonable person would conclude that her underwear was supposed to be showing, but in all other cases, the perv’s gonna lose.

[And, yes, I’ve met a few of these guys. One of them worked in a camera shop and eagerly showed off a digicam that had the lens connected by a 5-foot cable. His exact words were: “perfect for my sneakies!”. (if I recall correctly, it was this model)]

Jim Carrey in Horton Hears A Who. At least it’s not live action.

If the Haruhi-fan dance video hurt your eyes, this should help them recover. The actual voice actresses doing the song:

via Japan Sugoi

[Update: Nice t-shirt, Haruhi.]