Back Streets or Luxury? ー裏道か、豪華さかー

My recent trip to Vietnam with my wife and 9 year old son reminded me of travelling through South-east Asia twenty years ago.  I could see at that time, and I spent about three months backpacking through Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia.  Since losing my eyesight, and also having a young child, I have taken easier holidays in Japan or in resort areas with good hotels and facilities for tourists. 

In Vietnam we stayed in three different hotels – a small, cheap hotel in Hoi An, then a more luxurious hotel in central Da Nang, then a cheaper hotel near the beach in Da Nang.  The switch from cheap hotel to luxury hotel amazed my son.  When he saw the second hotel, and we were invited to enjoy the free afternoon tea (with a chocolate doughnut), my son kept saying, “I am rich!  I have become rich!” 

The thing which reminded me of backpacking years ago was wandering around a place where people didn’t speak English, and having random encounters and experiences.  There was a banh mi, or Vietnamese style baguette restaurant just across from our hotel in Hoi An, and we decided to give it a go.  It was lovely, and much nicer than the banh mi restaurant recommended by guide books and frequented by tourists rather than locals. 

We wandered through the back streets near our hotel in Hoi An, looking for a launderette.  We found kids kicking a ball up and down a narrow street, dodged passing scooters, found a place to get our laundry done, and bought some wonderful coconut flavoured iced coffee from a street vendor. 

Things became much easier once we reached the luxury hotel in Da Nang.  The beds were bigger.  I broke a glass at our first hotel by kicking it because I was sharing a bed with my son, and sleeping with my feet next to his head, and the night stand with my glass of water.  We could all stretch out and relax in the second hotel. 

The breakfast was also a delight in the second hotel.  I tried dishes such as roast duck, sticky rice, dumplings, and pho noodles. 

But despite the greater luxury and convenience of Da Nang, my wife and I much preferred the back streets of Hoi An.

 

Hoi An Soup －ホイアンスープ

Our taxi arrived in the evening at T and T Villa, a small, three star hotel in Hoi An. 

We checked in, and walked up two flights of stairs, since there was no elevator.  The staff, seeing that I was blind, kindly asked if we would like to move to a room on the ground floor.  I said it would  be fine using the stairs – after all, there was a constant noisy beeping from car and scooter horns at ground level. 

After a short rest, we headed out into the city.  Our first task was to find a mini-mart, said to be about a ten minute walk away, so that we could buy supplies such as bottled water.  Imagine a Japanese lady helping her nine year old son along, with her blind husband tapping his cane and holding her shoulder as they make their way up unfamiliar streets.  The roads were very uneven, and there were many scooters parked on the pavement, meaning we had to constantly step into the road for stretches until the pavement became free again.  Crossing busy roads was very difficult the first few times, since there were no pedestrian traffic lights and several lanes of beeping scooters. 

But we did get used to it.  The locals were very friendly and helpful.  Sometimes a scooter would stop to block the traffic to allow my wife to get us at least half way across the road.  You could stop half way and just let the traffic pass in front and behind you until a gap on the other side became available.  At other times, local pedestrians would gesture for us to cross the road alongside them, as they zipped between the vehicles with a practiced ease. 

We made it to the mini-mart.  We got our water, some snacks, and a bottle of nep moi, a Vietnamese rice vodka.  It is about 30 per cent alcohol, and a few glasses each evening helped me sleep soundly! 

It was already getting late, so rather than look for any particular restaurant, we decided just to stop at a random restaurant that seemed to be selling noodles.  So we had our first meal in Vietnam in a pho restaurant that turned out to serve only vegetarian dishes.  I ordered something that was a light soup with noodles, vegetables and several different kinds of tofu.  It was delicious.  My wife shared a different noodle, vegetable and tofu dish with our son.  It was as nice a meal as you could hope for, and the total cost for the two dishes was 50,000 Dong.  That’s about 315 Japanese Yen or 1 Pound and 50 Pence in U.K. money. 

It was stiflingly hot and humid.  My wife said that as the lady cooking our meal was ladling vegetables and tofu into our noodle soup, a big bead of sweat was running down her face.  As the sweat reached her nose, my wife wondered if it was going to drip into our soup.  It didn’t, and she smiled as she gave us our meals. 

As we were walking back to the hotel, dodging scooters and bumps in the road, the sweat was dripping down my back too.  There were smells all around – coffee, spices and frying food everywhere.  The roads were a chaotic bustle of noises.  I felt like I was in a human soup.  And I loved it. 

As a blind person on holiday with others, I can sometimes feel quite left out.  Everyone else is sightseeing – literally looking at a beautiful view or statue or painting that I cannot see.  But on my first evening in Hoi An, I felt very much a part of the trip.  I could hear it in the bustle of life around me, smell it in the great variety of foods on offer all round, and even feel it dripping down my back.

Jumbo Questions and Jumbo Plans －ジャンボ問とジャンボ計画－

My nine year old son has finished school for the summer and is at home every day.  I usually go shopping on Friday mornings with a guide, who is a Japanese lady in her eighties.  Today I let my son join us on our trip to the supermarket, and we took him to Mr. Donut’s on the way home. 

My son gets on well with the guide, and was happily telling her about various topics that came to his mind, such as an English test he recently passed and a book he is reading about demons.  After talking about himself for quite a while, he started asking her questions.  Children can be amazingly direct.  Here are some of the questions he asked without feeling awkward: How old are you?  How old are your parents?  So how old were they when they died?  What did you study at university?  So why didn’t you go to university? 

I jumped into the conversation to stop the inquisition.  I asked my son if he was going to study something at university. 

“No,” he said.  “I’m going to leave school after junior high school.” 

“So what will you do for money?” my guide asked. 

“I’ll just win the lottery,”  said my son.  “700 million Yen on the summer jumbo lottery.” 

“700 million Yen is a lot,” said my guide.  “What would you do if you won less money, such as just one million Yen?” 

“I’d buy one million Yen’s worth of new jumbo lottery tickets,” he said.  “I only want to win 700 million Yen.” 

It is nice to have a well thought out plan for your future.

 

Play Like a Penguin －ペンギンのようにプレイするー

I read an interesting comment from the football World Cup this week.  A former striker from England, Chris Sutton, commented on Portugal’s 1 – 0 loss to Spain.  He was irritated that the Portugal manager continued to play Cristiano Ronaldo even at the age of 41. 

He said, "He's waddling around the field like a grandad, that's why Portugal are out. Cristiano Ronaldo does nothing; he did nothing. What is Roberto Martinez doing? How can you pander to a player so much?" 

His comment contains a couple of good words to talk about. 

1 – to waddle 

To waddle means to walk with short, clumsy steps, swaying the body from side to side.  The word is often used to describe the way that a duck or penguin walks. 

I like the idea of a football team playing with 10 humans and one penguin, just to confuse the opposition.  At least if his contributions on the ball were substandard, he would be able to convincingly dive in the box to win penalties. 

Example sentence:

Late into her pregnancy, she began to waddle.

 

2 – to pander to someone or something 

Pander is used negatively.  To pander to someone means to let them have what they want or indulge their weaknesses, to keep them happy or avoid upsetting them. 

In the case of Chris Sutton’s comments, he believes that the manager let Cristiano Ronaldo play, even though he was not the best option for the team, in order to please or avoid annoying the player. 

Example sentence:

The prime minister is pandering to members of his own party, rather than doing what is best for the country as a whole. 

Information, Information, Information －情報、情報、情報－

Do you want to know a secret?  Do you want to have access to hidden knowledge that no one else in the universe has? 

Winston Churchill had toast for breakfast on the day he became prime minister.  That was it.  That was the secret. 

People say that knowledge is power, but it has to be useful knowledge.  And most knowledge is useless.  You have to try to find the useful knowledge within the great sea of useless information, like a fisherman patiently catching fish. 

That seems to be the message of a short story I read yesterday, anyway.  In a sci-fi story by Stanislaw Lem, two clever robots are captured by a pirate.  The robots offer the pirate gold, but he refuses. 

“I want knowledge, not gold,” says the pirate.  “I am a university educated pirate.  So I know that real power comes from information, not pretty metal.” 

The pirate demands that the robots tell him everything that they know before he will let them go.  The robots are worried.  They know a lot of things, and it would take a very long time to tell everything to the pirate.  So they come up with a plan. 

“If it is knowledge you seek, we can make for you a gift that will keep on giving.  We can summon a demon which will scribble down secrets and forgotten or hidden information as fast as you can read it.  Only you will have access to all this information.” 

The university educated pirate agrees, and the robots summon the demon.  Then they quickly run to their spaceship and escape before disaster strikes. 

The demon does start scribbling hidden information onto an ever growing pile of paper.  It rained in Amsterdam on the 1^st of July, 1187.  Mary Queen of Scots had three pairs of blue socks.  English teacher William’s grandmother was nicknamed “Gam” because his older brother couldn’t correctly say the word “Gran” when he was a child, and the name stuck… 

And so on.  Before the pirate realizes what is happening, he is suffocating in useless information.  Soon the paper is so thick around him that he is trapped and cannot escape.  He has to spend the rest of his days consuming pointless facts. 

If you ever find yourself scrolling social media “news” feeds and reading endless headlines of celebrity gossip, perhaps you will understand how the pirate feels.

 

Becoming Britaly －イギタリアになること－

“You know, people come to Italy for all sorts of reasons, but when they stay, it's for the same two things."

"What?"

"Love and gelato.”

from “Love and Gelato” by Jenna Evans Welch

 

“You may have the universe if I may have Italy”

Giuseppe Verdi

 

I think that the U.K. is becoming Italy, and I don’t know how I feel about it. 

The news is reporting that yesterday saw a temperature of 36.7 degrees, and people in the south of Britain are currently experiencing the warmest June night ever. 

This is not the weather for traditional British cups of hot tea, and grumbling complaints about how cold it is.  It is also not good for our old houses, built to keep the heat in rather than the heat out. 

At the same time, Britain is about to get its seventh prime minister in the last ten years.  Since Brexit, we have become politically unstable and, according to many observers, ungovernable.  Britain was traditionally seen as politically conservative, boring and predictable.  It was always Italy in the past that changed prime minister almost every year. 

Are Scotland or England going to suddenly win the World Cup this year, instead of failing miserably as usual?  Will the quality of British food improve?  Will the people become more passionate and expressive of their emotions? 

I’m sure it won’t be all bad living in the new land of Britaly.

 

The Customer is Always Right? －お客さんはいつも正しい？－

I went to the supermarket this morning with a guide.  My guide helps me do my shopping, taking me around the aisles and looking for the items that I request. 

I wanted to buy some dried apricots, which I had bought before.  But this time my guide couldn’t find them in the dried fruits section. 

She turned round and said, “Hold on.  I’ll ask someone about the apricots.” 

I heard her asking someone behind me, and a young man answering. 

“I think they should be on this shelf here, if they are here at all,” he said.  “Let me see…  There are prunes, cherries, raisins.  But I don’t see any apricots.” 

My guide got a little impatient with the young man.  “Well, do you have the apricots or don’t you?  Have they been moved to another shelf?” 

The young man got a bit flustered at the criticism and then said, “You know, I don’t actually work here.  I’m just a customer.” 

It was quite embarrassing.  We had been pestering the man and getting him to search the shelves, somehow assuming that he was a staff member. 

I never did find those dried apricots.  I will have to make do with prunes instead.

 

A Shot at Glory －栄光への一撃－

“I could [have] had class.  I could [have] been a contender. I could [have] been somebody – instead of a bum, which is what I am.”

Spoken by Marlon Brando’s character in the 1954 film, “On the Waterfront”

 

What makes success?  Opportunity, certainly.  Hard work, generally.  And a little bit of luck, more often than people like to admit. 

My son’s elementary school was testing the physical prowess and endurance of its children recently.  In an endurance test, the children had to run between two points and back again before a certain time limit was reached.  The time limit got shorter and shorter as the test progressed, making the feat harder to achieve even as the kids got more tired.  As soon as the child failed to make the goal one time, the test was over and the number of completed runs the child had managed was counted up. 

From memory, my son completed only about 14 runs in the same test last year.  But he goes to a karate dojo, and they have been practicing a similar activity.  So my son was doing much better this year.  He got to twenty runs, then thirty.  He passed forty runs, then fifty.  Now he was approaching the best performers in his whole school year.  There were only two boys still ahead of him.  He tasted glory.  To be the top performer in his whole year! 

At 55 completed runs, one of my son’s shoes suddenly fell off.  We had bought him a new pair of gym shoes recently, and had bought a pair that were a little too big for him, so that he could grow into them.  The new shoes cost him his shot at glory.

There is always next year….

 

Stepping Out 一歩踏み出す

One advantage to watching a story on television, rather than watching a story being told at a theatre, is that the actors on television cannot step out of the screen and attack the viewer.  At least, as long as the character of Sadako in the Japanese horror film “Ring” is really only fictional. 

Just how different it is to watch a play was felt by an audience member in a London theatre this week.  After an emotional play about a serious topic finished, one of the actresses came back out onto the stage.  She then pointed into the front rows and complained that an audience member had been texting on his smartphone all through the play’s most dramatic and emotional scene.  The actress asked him to consider how difficult this was for the actors to see, given the effort they were putting into telling a powerful story. 

“I just hope you are a doctor and were texting something vital to save a patient’s life,” she said. 

The rest of the audience gasped and applauded the actresses criticism of the distracted texter. 

I think people should do this more often.  When my family and I had just finished our meal at a family restaurant, we went to a self service cash machine to pay the bill.  Several people were standing in front of the only machine, chatting to each other instead of putting their money in and letting the next person have access. 

We just stood quietly and waited for them to leisurely finish their conversation and eventually get round to paying.  What we should have done was step into their little bubble of reality like Sadako. 

“People… I think you will find that there is a queue forming behind you.  As much as we are all fascinated to hear about your nephew’s school grades, I think it is time for you to PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING!” 

I’m not being too harsh, am I?  No, I didn’t think so.

 

A Lost Generation －失われた世代－

There was an interesting and worrying report published in the U.K. this week.  It is about how difficult it is for young people in Britain to get a job. 

Twenty years ago, the number of young people classified as “NEETs” – people not in employment, education or training – climbed to more than 100,000.  The government of the time warned that unless this changed, it might create a lost generation.  The number of young NEETs has just risen to more than 1,000,000, a massive increase.  Now 13.5 per cent of young people of working age in the U.K. are NEETs.  Six in ten of them have never had a job. 

The report says that there are many factors causing this, including a fall in the number of casual jobs, such as in bars, high street shops and restaurants which are suited to young people.  Another reason is an increase in mental illness in youngsters, which some people blame on smartphones.  Another reason given is the increase in the minimum wage that young people are entitled to, and increased rights for workers and taxes on business, making it less attractive for businesses to take a risk by hiring a young worker.  Then there is damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic and disruptions to education. 

It has always been difficult for young people to get a good and well paid job.  My older cousin told me that years ago he was given his first job by our uncle.  Our uncle owned several shops and a bar. 

“I can give you a job,” said our uncle.  “It will be tough work, but a good experience for you.” 

So my cousin took the job, working in the bar at night.  He took orders, cleaned glasses and learned how to pour drinks.  He was surprised to find that his uncle’s bar offered night entertainment to his gentleman customers, including a stripper. 

At the end of a hard first evening’s work, my cousin went to our uncle and asked for his wages.  Our uncle pointed to the lady entertainer who had taken her clothes off. 

“You got to see that for free didn’t you?  You don’t need any more wages than that.” 

My cousin quickly started looking for another job.

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.

 

Pet Rock －ペットのロック－

I was listening to the BBC news this week, and there was an item about pets.  Apparently, the number of dogs and cats in the U.K. is very large – more than 13 million dogs and more than 12 million cats in a country of 69 million people. 

To give a bit of context, a news reporter went to a pet museum, where an expert talked about the history of pets.  That expert also talked about odd trends in pet ownership, such as the mummification of cats in ancient Egypt and the invention of Tamagotchi as virtual pets.  Then he mentioned “pet rock.” 

I had a sudden image of a rock band featuring pets.  The human drummer bangs his drums:  badda, badda, bing, bing, crash!  The human guitarist strikes his instrument: kerrang!  Then the spotlight shifts to the vocalist: miaow!!! 

I realized that this would be ridiculous and then had another thought.  The rocks are diamonds, emeralds and rubies.  Rich pet owners are dressing their dogs in jewellery for a walk in the park. 

But this thought was wrong too.  Apparently, in the 1970s, an American businessman picked up some stones and put them in a box with “breathing holes.”  He then sold these rocks as pets, and made a successful business out of his pet rocks. 

The real pet rock turned out to be the stupidest idea of the three.  I actually think a cat vocalist accompanying loud guitar and drum music would do well on Spotify.

 

Smarter than the Average Bear －平均的な熊より賢い－

“I’ll steal from the rich and give to a poor bear – me!”

Cartoon character, Yogi Bear

 

I have been reading an interesting book about the attempts of scientists to communicate with animals. 

There is a lot of scientific debate and disagreement about how intelligent different animals are, and whether animal communication can be called language. 

On the intelligence of bears, the writer mentioned a problem staff had at Yosemite national park in America.  Nobody could seem to design a bin that would allow human tourists to put their rubbish into, which the bears would not be able to also access. 

A frustrated staff member said, “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest human tourists.”