I happened upon this treasure trove of Charlie Brown videos today, dubbed into Japanese! When I was young, we would watch A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving over and over again. I’m glad that I can watch it in Japanese now:

All 17 videos are available here.

As far as I can tell, that should say “Update: Japanese studies”…

I have taken a temporary break from the kanji to begin studying Japanese grammar in preparation for the JLPT4 this fall. Yesterday I worked through the major particles　「は」, 「も」, and 「が」, and this morning I have been looking at adjectives.

One interesting thing I learned this morning was that ‘like’ is an adjective in Japanese and not a verb, as in English. For example, in the sentence ボブは魚が好きだ, ‘Bob likes fish’, 好き, which means ‘like’, is an adjective that points to the fish and says that it is the desirable thing, instead of performing an action on the fish (’liking’ the fish).

Japanese grammar is very interesting to me. It’s totally different from English and from the European languages I have studied. For me, it’s like starting over with a clean slate, being in kindergarten again, and everything is new and exciting once more.

Over the past week I have slacked off on my reviews of kanji because it hasn’t been enjoyable–as a matter of fact, I probably got a little burned out after that major push to the halfway mark two Sundays ago. After being sick last weekend, my motivation towards kanji has been sadly lacking, but my friend Hashimura-san’s lessons have been interesting, so I am going to go with what is most enjoyable, to keep things fresh and interesting.

That’s the Japanese update. I’ll have a family update later on this week, along with the pictures of our trip to the Children’s Museum of Atlanta this past weekend.

Update: The authors of the extension left a comment which explained the suspicious-looking line. They’re not as evil as I thought! I will leave the post here, as there are many companies with EULAs, privacy policies, and the like that can do tricky stuff like I thought this company was doing…or worse.

So I’m browsing through the extensions on Mozilla.org and come across this new one called Yoono that connects my browser to Yahoo! IM, FriendFeed, Twitter, etc. an extension that looked interesting. Since this is my work computer, I read the EULA carefully and spot this paragraph:

By posting any User Content on the Service, you expressly grant, and you represent and warrant that you have a right to grant, to Yoono a royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, list information regarding, edit, translate, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, and make derivative works of all such User Content and your name, voice, and/or likeness as contained in your User Content, in whole or in part, and in any form, media or technology, whether now known or hereafter developed for use in connection with the Service.

In case you fell asleep in the first few words of legalese (and believe me, I wouldn’t blame you!), that means, if you post anything on the service, like send an IM, tweet, photo, anything…they own it and can do what they want with it.

No way.

I have posted a comment to this effect on their blog. We’ll see if they respond. They did.

In the meantime, read before you click. You might be giving them more than you’re getting.

Paranoid? You betcha. But my stuff is my stuff.

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Originally uploaded by Ken OHYAMA

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here before, but in my spare time (ha!) I am a bit of a roadgeek, so this wonderful photo set is heaven for me. These interchanges and freeways are a thing of beauty.

Thanks for your thoughts and prayers. I’m feeling much better than the other day…able to eat normal food for the most part, but I will be eating better from now on.

Hannah was still running a fever yesterday. The doctor said Monday that it was a virus and it should be gone soon, so we’re still praying.

Sorry I haven’t been around much; I’ve been sick since last Wednesday with some sort of stomach bug and throat infection. It hasn’t been very much fun here. Hannah has had a fever all weekend, so Michele is taking her to the doctor today. That’s what’s up in our world; hope things are going better with you.

The frustrating thing about this is that it’s delayed my Japanese studies by several days. I haven’t felt like it. It wasn’t a total loss–I did finish watching 電脳コイル (Dennou Coil) and 結婚できない男 (Kekkon Dekinai Otoko) over the weekend, so at least I had some Japanese input–but I need to make up for lost time. :(

Hannah and I have both been sick the past few days. Michele bought me a bunch of Jell-O because it’s good for wonky stomachs, and Hannah noticed I was eating it, so she started saying ‘Dello too, dello too’. So cute.

…for the win.

(via)

Ah, I found a trailer to Hayao Miyazaki’s latest film!

It was just released in Japan on the 19th, so I’m not sure when it will be released internationally.

While my wife and I were still dating (we were high school sweethearts!), we went to see the John Travolta movie Phenomenon in the theaters. It’s a good movie, well worth a rent, even though it’s a bit saccharine and weird in spots. (Hey, we’re talking about John Travolta here, so some nuttiness along those lines is to be expected.)

Anyway. One of the real treats of the movie is not the movie itself, but the soundtrack. The headline song is ‘Change The World’ by Eric Clapton, and it’s an amazing song:

The soundtrack was also notable, in my opinion, for a wonderful acoustic version of Peter Gabriel’s ‘I Have The Touch’, a little-known song of his. The lyrics are a little strange (of course!), but this version of the song is…dare I say it?…phenomenal.

The song came to mind, by the way, because of a completely unrelated song, ‘Love the world’, which is the new single by a Japanese electronic band named Perfume. I like this video because it involves a Rubik’s Cube, one of my favorite puzzles:

I wasn’t impressed with the last single, Akihabalove, though the song is starting to grow on me a bit. I think their next album will be really good.