It can be hard for three people to live in
a small apartment in Tokyo, mostly unable to go outside, especially if one of
the people is a demanding three year-old.
So I have been trying many different ways to keep a small child
amused. One way has been to make up
stories with him. We start with, “Once
upon a time”, and continue from there.
Mostly I continue the story, but my son makes things up too.
Here is an example of a story which my son
and I came up with together. Can you
guess which bits were created by a three year-old?
The Little Sumo and the Moon Cola (part 1):
Once upon a time, the little sumo, who was
three years old, was walking the streets of Tokyo with Mummy and Daddy.
“I’m thirsty,” said the little sumo.
“Okay,” said Daddy. “Let’s stop at a vending machine and buy
something to drink.”
So they all walked until they came to a
vending machine. If they hadn’t been so
thirsty, they probably wouldn’t have noticed the vending machine. That’s because it was grey, and was the same
colour as the wall behind it.
Mummy looked at the drinks on sale in the
vending machine. There was Coca Cola,
Pepsi Cola, Dr Pepper, and Moon Cola.
Mummy read the list of available drinks aloud. “That’s a shame! They don’t have any water, or drinks the
little sumo would like,” she said.
“I want moon cola!” said the little sumo.
“I’ve never heard of moon cola,” said
Daddy. “It might be interesting to try
it.
So they decided to buy some moon cola, and
give it a try.
Mummy gave the little sumo a coin to place
in the vending machine. The coin was
round and silver, and the light sparkled from it. The little sumo put it into the slot in the
vending machine.
Mummy pressed the button for the moon cola,
but nothing happened. “That’s strange,”
she said. “The moon cola is not coming
out of the machine.”
“Try and get your money back then,” said
Daddy. “It must be sold out.”
But the money was not returned either. The vending machine seemed to have swallowed
it up, and was not going to give it back.
“Let me try!” said the little sumo. And he pulled on the front of the vending
machine.
It opened, like a door!
Inside, there was no cola to be seen, and
no money. But there was a little square
space, like in an elevator.
The little sumo stepped inside. Mummy and Daddy went inside too, to have a
look around.
Just thenthe door closed behind them! For a moment it was dark, but soon a pale
grey light began to shine inside the little box. Then they could hear a voice – a sort of
shiny, metal, vending machine voice – and it was saying, “Five, four, three,
two, one…”
“Oh dear,” said Mummy. “I hope we will be all right.”
*
I don’t want to make this blog post too
long. So I’ll post the second part of
the story next week. I hope the family
will be all right. I wonder if the
little sumo will ever find his moon cola?
Vocabulary:
a vending machine–a machine which sells
things such as food and drinks
to sparkle – to shine brightly with flashes
of light
“That’s a shame” – That is very
unfortunate, or regrettable
a slot – a small, narrow space for
inserting something such as a coin
I wonder what kind of pizza Jesus would
have eaten?
Perhaps we could ask Softbank’s CEO,
Masayoshi Son. According to recent news,
after he was criticised for his performance due to huge losses suffered by
Softbank, he compared himself to Jesus.
“Jesus was misunderstood too,” he is reported to have said. He later apologised.
One of the miracles that Jesus is famous
for is the Miracle of the Loaves and the Fishes. With just a few loaves of bread and a few fish,
he was somehow able to feed thousands of people.
Perhaps Masayoshi Son has been trying to
perform his own food miracle – the Magic Money Pizza.
The owner of a pizza restaurant, who did
not offer home delivery for his luxury pizzas, was very surprised to find that
his pizzas were available on a food home-delivery app called DoorDash. The restaurant owner was even more surprised
to find that customers could buy his pizzas on this home-delivery app for less
money than he was selling them for in his restaurant. He sold deluxe pizzas for 24 Dollars in his
restaurant, which were available on-line for 16 Dollars.
Confused, the restaurant owner asked his
friend to order 10 deluxe pizzas from his restaurant on the DoorDash app. His friend paid 160 Dollars. Sure enough, the company DoorDash paid the
restaurant 240 Dollars for the pizzas.
The restaurant owner was now able to make a profit by selling pizzas to
himself. He started to maximise his
profits by selling pizzas to himself which had no topping.
DoorDash is apparently happy to make a loss
for a while in order to show restaurant owners that they are able to attract
lots of custom. The losses are supported
by investors such as Softbank and their CEO Masayoshi Son.
I usually charge 3,000 Yen for a 50 minute
English lesson. But if DoorDash would
like to charge 2,000 Yen for the same lesson, and pay me 3,000 Yen, I will
happily teach myself. I am such an
experienced teacher that I could even do it in my sleep.
Vocabulary:
a loaf (many loaves) – an amount of bread
which is baked and shaped, usually before being cut into slices
“Magic Money Pizza” – This is based upon
the “Magic money tree” – the idea that money can be gotten for free and will
never run out (eg. That politician has promised to spend lots and lots of money
which the country cannot afford. Has he
found the magic money tree?)
Sure enough – As expected
I used to live in Osaka, and I found a
lovely local izakaya near my apartment.
I made friends with the owner. I learned how to play shogi there with some
of the regular customers. I tried
various foods for the first time, such as ocha-zuke and yaki-onigiri.
One day I was sitting at the counter with
my Australian friend. We were just drinking sho-chu and chatting. A middle-aged Japanese guy came and sat at
the counter, next to us.
He tried to engage us in conversation, but
at that time my friend and I did not speak Japanese very well, and the newcomer
didn’t speak English well either. We
were not too interested in talking to him, and just exchanged a few smiles,
said, “Hmmm,” a few times, and went back to our drinking.
Then the guy seemed to get annoyed that we
were ignoring him. He tapped me on the
shoulder. I turned around to look at
him. He held up one of his hands, which
was missing two fingers.
“I am yakuza. I am your friend,” he said.
There was a pause for a moment as my friend
and I gazed at his missing fingers.
“Umm, hey, great! Yeah!
Let’s be friends!” we said.
Suddenly we didn’t want to make this guy angry.
He bought us some more alcohol and we drank
together, trying to communicate in a mixture of broken English and broken
Japanese. The man’s wife and son were
also in the izakaya, but they had been sitting in other seats away from the
counter. The yakuza guy called them
over. His son seemed very young – maybe
about 13 years old. The son and the
father exchanged some very harsh words with each other. The father was asking his son to take off his
shirt and show us his tattoos. The son
didn’t want to do it, and shouted angrily at his father. The father shouted angrily back, seeming to
threaten his son with violence.
Eventually, scowling, the teenager lifted
up his shirt. His shoulder and arm were
covered in huge dragon tattoos.
The poor boy had no chance to choose a
different life for himself. He might
have been smart enough to be a lawyer or doctor. But he would find it difficult to be anything
else in life but a yakuza because of those tattoos, and that father.
I hope my own son is clever enough to walk
a different path than his old man has.
“Stay away from sho-chu!” is my humble advice to him.
Vocabulary:
to tap someone on the shoulder – to touch
someone lightly on the shoulder in order to attract their attention
broken (English) – (English) which is not
fluent, or basic and containing many mistakes or pauses
to scowl–to show an angry or bad-tempered
expression
one’s old man – one’s father (casual)
The evil hunchbacked Sicilian Vizzini has
kidnapped the Princess Buttercup, and he holds a knife to her throat. The man in black wants to rescue her, and has
challenged Vizzini to a battle of wits.
The winner will take custody of the princess, and the loser will
die. The man in black takes two goblets
of wine, and some deadly iocaine poison.
He turns away from Vizzini and puts the poison in one goblet of
wine. Vizzini doesn’t know which goblet
of wine has been poisoned, and must choose which one to drink from.
Edited extract from “The Princess Bride,”
by William Goldman:
"Guess which goblet to drink from?"
Vizzini cried. "I don't guess. I think. I consider. Then I decide. But I
never guess."
"The battle of wits has begun,"
said the man in black. "It ends when you decide and we drink the wine and
find out who is right and who is dead. We both drink, need I add, and swallow,
naturally, at precisely the same time."
"It's all so simple," said Vizzini.
"All I have to do is deduce, from what I know of you, the way your mind
works. Are you the kind of man who would put the poison into his own glass, or
into the glass of his enemy?"
"You're stalling," said the man
in black.
"I'm relishing this," answered
the Sicilian. "No one has challenged my mind in years and I love it. . . .
By the way, may I smell both goblets?"
"Be my guest. Just be sure you put
them down the same way you found them."
The Sicilian sniffed his own glass; then he
reached across the kerchief for the goblet of the man in black and sniffed
that. "As you said, it’s odourless."
"As I also said, you're
stalling."
The Sicilian smiled and stared at the wine
goblets. "Now a great fool," he began, "would place the wine in
his own goblet, because he would know that only another great fool would reach
first for what he was given. I am clearly not a great fool, so I can clearly
not reach for your wine."
"That's your final choice?"
"No. Because you knew I was not a
great fool, so you would know that I would never fall for such a trick. You
would count on it. So I can clearly not reach for mine either."
"Keep going," said the man in
black.
"I intend to." The Sicilian
reflected a moment. "We have now decided the poisoned cup is most likely
in front of you.”
The man in black was starting to get
nervous. "Truly you have a great intellect," whispered the man in
black.
"You have fought and beaten my giant,
which means you are exceptionally strong, and exceptionally strong men are
convinced that they are too powerful ever to die, too powerful even for iocane
poison, so you could have put it in your cup, trusting on your strength to save
you; thus I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you."
The man in black was very nervous now. "You're
just trying to make me give something away with all this chatter," said
the man in black angrily. "Well it won't work. You'll learn nothing from
me, that I promise you."
"I have already learned everything
from you," said the Sicilian. "I know where the poison is."
"Only a genius could have deduced as
much. You cannot frighten me," said the man in black, but there was fear
all through his voice.
"Shall we drink then?"
"Pick, choose, quit dragging it out,
you don't know, you couldn't know."
The Sicilian only smiled at the outburst.
Then a strange look crossed his features and he pointed off behind the man in
black. "What in the world can that be?" he asked.
The man in black turned around and looked.
"I don't see anything."
"Oh, well, I could have sworn I saw
something, no matter." The Sicilian began to laugh.
"I don't understand what's so
funny," said the man in black.
"Tell you in a minute," said the
hunchback. "But first let's drink."
And he picked up his own wine goblet.
The man in black picked up the one in front
of him.
They drank.
"You guessed wrong," said the man
in black.
"You only think I guessed wrong,"
said the Sicilian, his laughter ringing louder. "That's what's so funny. I
switched glasses when your back was turned."
There was nothing for the man in black to
say.
"Fool!" cried the hunchback.
He kept laughing until the iocane powder
took effect, and he suddenly died.
The man in black stepped quickly over the
corpse, then ripped the blindfold from the Princess's eyes.
"You killed him," she whispered.
"I let him die laughing," said
the man in black.
Buttercup rubbed her wrists, stopped,
massaged her ankles. She took a final look at the Sicilian. "To
think," she murmured, "all that time it was your cup that was
poisoned."
"They were both poisoned," said the
man in black. "I've spent the past two years building up immunity to
iocane powder."
Vocabulary:
to take custody of someone – to take care
or control of someone who cannot look after themselves
precisely - exactly
to deduce something–to arrive at a fact or
conclusion by reasoning
to stall – to deliberately try to waste
time or delay
to relish something – to greatly enjoy
something
“Be my guest.” – Go ahead; Certainly
to sniff something – to breathe in loudly and
sharply through the nose
to drag something out – to make something
last longer than is necessary
a corpse – a dead body
