The Football Kid －フットボール・キッド－

Karate Sensei Kreese:

What do we study here?

Karate class (shouting):

The way of the fist, sir!

Kreese:

And what is that way?

Karate class (shouting):

Strike first; strike hard; no mercy, sir!

 

“Lesson not just karate only.  Lesson whole life.”

Mr. Miyagi

Both from the film, The Karate Kid

 

My nine year old son plays for his school football team.  They take part in competitions against teams from other schools, as well as private football clubs. 

The private clubs tend to have better players, and stricter coaches.  The school teams want to give a chance to all of the children to play, not just the best ones.  That is just as well for my son, since he is not one of the best players! 

Especially for young children, there has to be some balance between trying to win and trying to develop other life skills, such as confidence, friendship, and an appreciation of hard work.  At least that is how I see it. 

Not everyone agrees with my view, however. 

My son’s team were playing one of the strongest private club sides in the area recently.  My son’s team scored a goal against their better opponents.  Then the captain of the other team shouted, “Come on, guys!  We shouldn’t be losing goals to a team as bad as this!” 

This is where the coach of the club side should have said something like, “Hey, xx-kun!  You shouldn’t say things like that.  Don’t disrespect your opponents.” 

Instead, the coach just laughed.  I got the impression that the captain was repeating the same thing the coach had said to the team before the match.  It made me think of the coach as the nasty karate teacher, Mr. Kreese who taught the children in his dojo to compete with no mercy or sympathy for their opponent. 

I hope there is still room for teachers more like Mr. Miyagi, whose karate training methods included trying to catch a fly with a pair of chopsticks.

Ramen in Wonderland －不思議の国のラーメンー

 “Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make a respectable person!”

Alice in Alice in Wonderland, after she has shrunk

 

I recently went to a Kitakata Ramen restaurant with my family.  We hadn’t been there for quite a while. 

While we were waiting for our order to arrive, a young woman sat down at the table next to ours.  I heard her order her food. 

“One bowl of normal ramen, with an extra topping of flavoured egg, and a side dish of gyoza.” 

“What an appetite she has!” I thought.  The last time I had been to Kitakata Ramen, one bowl of ramen had been more than enough to make me full. 

Then my bowl of ramen arrived.  The portion size had shrunk considerably.  My nine year old son complained that he was still hungry after he ate an adult portion of ramen. 

This is shrinkflation: instead of companies and restaurants putting up prices, they cut costs by shrinking the size of their meals.  Perhaps this is a chance to try a new diet.  In the shrinkflation diet, you don’t have to do anything differently.  You order exactly the same meals that you used to, and you too will shrink.

 

The Wise Sayings of Famous Characters －有名人たちの名言－

I read a funny poem recently by Ian McMillan.  It is about the main character of the first novel written in the English language, Robinson Crusoe.  In the 1719 novel, Robinson Crusoe is shipwrecked on an island for 28 years.  For almost all of the time he lives by himself, until eventually he escapes back to England. 

McMillan’s poem imagines some of the wise sayings Crusoe has come up with after his adventure.  These are a few examples from his poem: 

“You can never have too many turtle’s eggs.”

“I’m the most interesting person in this room.”

“A beard is as long as I want it to be.” 

I wondered what some other fictional characters’ wise sayings would be. 

“Try not to slam doors.”

“Check with air traffic control before flying near La Guardia Airport.”

“If you are strong enough, people will not laugh at a man who wears his underwear on the outside of his pants.”

Some Wise Sayings of Superman 

“Sunrises are overrated.”

“It is hard to get a dentist’s appointment twice.”

“Enjoy yourself while you can: you are a long time dead!”

Some Wise Sayings of Count Dracula

 

Gremlins in the Cracks －隙間にいるグレムリンたちー

“Don’t ever feed him after midnight!” 

“If your air conditioner goes on the fritz, or your washing machine blows up, or your video recorder conks out; before you call the repair man, turn on all the lights, check all the closets and cupboards, look under all the beds, [because] you never can tell – there just might be a gremlin.”

Quotes from the 1984 movie, “Gremlin”

 

The more complicated that technology becomes, the more dark corners there are for bugs and flaws to hide in.  We should expect errors, and not blindly rely on complicated systems to work well without human supervision. 

A recent example is that Chat GPT’s developers have had to tweak its code in order to stop it slipping words such as “goblin” and “gremlin” into its answers.  Apparently, the makers tried to make the AI chatbot sound more nerdy, to make it more engaging.  This rewarded the chatbot for using quirky metaphors.  So it started talking about users avoiding goblins instead of avoiding difficulties, or removing gremlins instead of fixing problems.  Users complained and the company changed the code, to ban the use of monsters as metaphors. 

Another story I heard today about a naive over-reliance on AI algorithms came from Sweden.  A mother was shocked that her child was assigned a school that was very difficult to get to.  Talking with other parents, the mother found that the same thing had happened to many of their children.  Instead of being sent to the nearest school, they had to travel miles down river, cross a bridge, and come miles back up the other side of the river. 

Eventually, after hiring lawyers and fighting the local education board in court, they found that the board had started using an AI algorithm to assign students to the school nearest their house.  This improved efficiency for the education board, and let their staff work on other things.  But the algorithm didn’t take account of roads, rivers, bridges and so on.  It just assigned students to the nearest school as if the students were birds, and could fly over all roads and obstacles. 

We will have to get used to living with gremlins.  There are bound to be ever more of them living alongside us in the future.

 

Coffee on the Moon 月のコーヒー

NASA recently sent human astronauts around the moon.  They, and also China, plan to establish a base on the moon where humans can live for extended periods.  This made me wonder what kind of facilities will be built on the moon for the resident humans.  They will need oxygen and living quarters and so on.  There will be attempts to mine usable resources from the moon.  But even astronauts can’t spend all their time working.  I am sure that one of the first non-essential facilities for downtime will be a place which serves coffee. 

That got me thinking about names for the first coffee shop to open on the moon.  If I can get the name right, perhaps I can copyright it  and then sell it to Elon Musk.  So here are some ideas I came up with:

 

1 – Coffee Lunatic 

A lunatic is a crazy person.  So the name suggests something like, “Crazy for Coffee”.  And Luna is, of course, an alternative name for the moon.  The word lunatic comes from the folk belief that the full moon makes people crazy.  Think of werewolves who change by the light of the full moon.

 

2 – Need a Buzz? 

A buzz can mean a burst of energy or excitement.  You might say, “I get a buzz from playing music.”  Buzz was also the nickname of the astronaut who was the second person to walk on the surface of the moon.

 

3 – Bean Up Here Long? 

Have you been up here on the moon for a long time?  Would you like some coffee beans?  Okay, this was not my best effort.

 

4 – Fly Me to the Moon Café 

This refers to a song sung by, amongst others, Frank Sinatra.

 

5 – Blue Moonday 

“Blue Monday” is the phenomenon of feeling unhappy on Monday morning when you have to start the working week.  You might need a strong cup of coffee to fight the Monday blues on Earth.  Living on a cold, dead rock is probably going to be challenging for anyone living on a moon base too.  So if you’re feeling down, why not head over to Blue Moonday for a nice cup of coffee.

 

This really is how I spend my days – thinking of names for imaginary coffee shops.

Scribble or Tap? －カキカキ、それともカチカチ？－

 Tap – tap – tap – tap – tap! 

“What are you doing?” 

Tap – tap – tap – tap – tap! 

“I said – What are you doing?” 

Tap – tap – tap - tap! 

“I said…!” 

“Sorry, Daddy.  I am doing a typing game.  I just wanted to knock down this monster.” 

My son has been playing Typing Coliseum.  His school provided the game as a way for the students to learn how to type on a keyboard.  A word appears on the screen, along with a monster.  They have to type that word in quickly in order to knock down the monster. 

The trouble is, the game seems to be very addictive.  When my wife went to the school the other day, the library was full of elementary school kids, furiously tapping their keyboards in order to battle monsters.  Wasn’t there a time when libraries were for reading books? 

The Swedish government has just announced that it is moving away from the use of electronic screens in schools, and going back to paper and pencils.  Sweden had been pushing the use of technology in schools and pre-schools very hard.  But this coincided with a drop in students’ performance in some key areas, especially in literacy and maths.  The Swedish government acted when surveys revealed that 24 per cent of Swedish 15 and 16 year olds were unable to reach a basic level of literacy.  It is not that technology must never be used.  But it can certainly be used too much. 

I wonder if Japan’s schools will start to move in the same direction, and we will again hear the sound of scribbling pencils, instead of frantically tapping keys.

 

Issun-kyoshi (the Little Teacher) 一 ー寸教師 －

Because of his school’s spring vacation, my 9 year old son was at home during the day a lot over the last couple of weeks. 

I could go and talk to him between English lessons I was teaching. 

“Daddy, could I teach English, do you think?” he asked. 

“Yes, I guess so.  Maybe when you are a bit older, you could teach English,” I said. 

He watched me picking up the lesson fee I had just received from the table. 

“I could help you teach English soon, Daddy.  You can give me a test and tell me when my English is good enough to teach.” 

He wanted me to pay him as an assistant teacher. 

I told him his English would have to get better.  He answered, “Okay, can you teach me now?” 

So I sat him on the opposite side of the table to me, and started teaching him as if he was my student.  He did well answering questions such as, “Where do you live?” and “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” 

Then I got him to ask me questions.  I would say, “I am from Scotland,” and he would have to ask, “Where are you from?” 

I said, “I like to go to karaoke, and I like to play the guitar.” 

He thought for a moment, then asked, “What are your hobbits?” 

It might be a little early for my assistant English teacher to start teaching, unless his students are studying Lord of the Rings.