funny take on the characteristic “shopping-bag arm” in Japan. probably only funny to me but, hey! i’m the guy wearing the shirt that says “i went to japan and all i got was a job, a wife, son, debt-free and, oh yeah, this shitty shirt”
you probably wouldn’t know this from reading my blog but I actually do have a degree in English lit and taught English as a second language for seven years. So, while I am admittedly losing my ability to *speak* English (ahem), I still manage to avert total linguistic loss through practiced repetition of writing out my thoughts now and again.
that said, I have to chuckle at bloggers who take blogging sooooo seriously. to my mind, that is as flaky as guitarists who think they are eddie van halen’s lost-offspring and ardently aspire to get back to the fold.
wait, now I’m totally off topic. see what I mean? serious bloggers, like, care about that stuff. me, i’m more of a “take it as it comes” kinda guy.
back to my point: shitty writers that can’t write. like folks that use the word “whilst” in their writing. that always pokes me as a peculiar mix of pretentiousness and old-fashionedness: unripe and overripe at the same time.
grammatically, the connection between while and whilst is not unlike among and amongst or amid and amidst. but these others are not nearly as stigmatized. again and against have left their former sphere and now operate under different meanings. but while and whilst…oi ve.
it just makes me laugh and groan when I read a twenty-something say it. that’s not to say I haven’t been pretentious in my time. i used whilst when i was fifteen. and maybe that is part of the problem: i used it to sound more knowledgeable than I really was at the time. so I kind of think that slips into other people’s use of it too. and when that happens, my clap-trap alarm goes off.
okay, so there you have it. i’m a closet critic after all. lol.
This post will only interest folks that are aware of Soka Gakkai party in Japan. The author claims that Soka Gakkai is not a cult–but then goes into some observations about cults in general that merit reading. Not a profound blog entry, mind you, but interesting if you were in Japan and routinely heard Japanese folks refer to this as a “strange” group of people. When Japanese collectively label something strange, I tend to pay attention. And this is the first time I’ve seen a defense of it–in English, to boot.
Here is a the original news piece that stimulated the above rebuttal . Worth reading both since this latter appears more in the vein of journalism but still contributes to the obfuscation of this odd-ball group.
if you have ever been to a japanese sushi shop with a rotating selection (”kaiten sushi”–literally, merry-go-round sushi) you’ll get a kick out of this: how sushi must feel