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Seems like aurora displays have become a worldwide phenomenon now. It's reported that some auroras appeared in the night skies of Hokkaido as well. Wow, how I wish I were in one of those places to see one. I've never seen those dramatic luminous displays, though I hear auroras were sometimes seen on very cold days in my town long, long ago. I'm not a sky watcher, and, you know, I hate the cold in winter, but I'd like to see one, at least once in my life.
With den4 coming back to this site, I've set up a forum again. Feel free to write in anything you like there, friends. ;)
Much to the relief of baseball haters out there, I guess, the pro baseball season is now over on the other side of the Pacific. And here in Japan, too, the Series will see the last game of the season, Game 7, today.
Though I'm not a big fan of pro baseball, I've seen most of the games of the World Series (what a name btw...) and Japan Series this time. Thanks to the time differences, the World Series were aired in the morning here, around 9 o'clock, which is prime time for me. The Yanks lost, and Godzilla fizzled out. Ha! Yeah, I know the teams I root for are likely to lose. That's life.
By the way, why do big leaguers spit all the time? Watching baseball games is fun, but no thanks for the spectacle of spitting.
Just been to the barber's for a haircut. Actually, I don't like going to barber shops. I'd rather sit in front of my PC reading cool blogs than go all the way to the barber's and sit still there. Well, well, the fact is, I'm nearsighted and so, with my glasses off, I can't see well what's going on around my top while the barber is cutting my hair. Whenever I sit on the chair there, I feel as if I were a carp on the cutting board. See? It's from a Japanese expression:
まな板の上の鯉 (manaita no ue no koi)
A helpless situation where you can't do anything. You are at the mercy of fate.
Fortunately, my usual barber does a neat job every time and never makes me disappointed, even though I've never been satisfied with my hairstyle. ;)
Well, the calendar on the left column shows that I haven't blogged on Sunday, Monday, and Friday so far this month. It's not that I've decided not to blog on those particular days of the week. It might be... on Sunday I want to take a day off as the way the world goes. On Monday I feel too depressed to blog because the rest of the world says it's blue Monday. On Friday I haven't got the urge to blog because the common message must be TGIF.
Hah. What the heck am I talking about?
The New York Yankees have made it to the World Series. I root for them since Hideki "Godzilla" Matsui is in the squad. Even though his performance in the regular season was far from satisfactory, taking his potential ability into consideration, I think it great of him to play as a start member for the prestigious (wow, I spelled it right) team. And, man, it's exciting to root for a really strong team, you know, especially after seeing my favorite one in the Japan Leagues, the Yokohama BayStars, standing at the foot of the table all year.
Speaking of the Championship Series, I don't understand why the US media have disclosed the name and occupation of the guy who reached for a foul ball in Game 6 of the Cubs and the Marlins. Is this practice regarded as a usual one in the US? The guy may have done a stupid thing, which I frankly think he did, but does he have to be treated like a criminal or something by the news media? No, I don't get it.
Thanks, den4, for the nice link. Talking Governator! Guvnuh! Guvnuh! ;)
Oh, and another funky piece. Arnold and Gary. (Link via cat@log) Sorry, Beth. ;) Whenever I hear the name of Arnold, I think of this Arnold Jackson of Diff'rent Strokes.
"I wanna, uh, I wanna, uh, I really wanna ...." Boy, that will keep resounding in my head all day.
It has been bothering me recently that comment spam has kept messing around my site. One of such trolls disguises himself as a good-will poster saying good things like "Cool... a nice blog." Yeah, my blog must be nice since you could possibly lead the visitors here to your zip-code-what-the-heck-is-that site. I don't think you can, though. But even so, by doing so, you could get a good place in the Google search. Shit. One lolita keeps posting a bunch of nasty comments full of shitty links at a time. Heh, I disable HTML in my comments feature. Too bad for you, huh?
Well, it's a pain to delete all the garbage manually every morning.
I found this site offering a way to kill comment spam using a blacklist of spamming sites. It seems to work all right for now. Phew....
Thanks guys for taking the time to visit and comment on my Japanese blog. The kinda-amazing blog seems to come back to life now. ;)
The HES "What a lame name" DIARY has a longer history than KEC Journal. It started with my school website back in 2001. I posted brief, diary-like entries in Japanese there. It was rather ironic that after I began using MovableType to power the diary in April last year, I started to post there less and less, and the site stopped updating after the November 19 entry.
I have no specific idea as to what to do with the poor blog from now. KEC Journal is my main blog, for sure. But I've found it extremely fun and interesting to keep two blogs in different languages. I once thought of making HES DIARY a translated version of KEC Journal, as M wished in her comment on HES DIARY, but gave up the idea since it's simply a very tough job. Mieko-san is great. Anyway, I want to make these two blogs interact with each other in some way every once in a while.
Do you happen to know I have a Japanese blog? In fact, it's a totally amazing blog, even if I do say so myself. How amazing? Well, I don't mean to brag, but it's an amazingly un-updated blog, and what is still amazing is, it's not abandoned at all! Amazed? Ha ha ha!
And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, it's my great pleasure to announce ... that the amazing HES DIARY was recently updated for the first time in 11 months! Wow!
Hey, how uncool the title, HES DIARY, is! It doesn't sound like a blog. But who cares? It's an amazing blog. Moreover, it sure is one of the most unread blogs in the world.
So, folks, please come and see my Japanese blog. I've just posted a special entry in English for you. ;)
So, Shuwa-chan is much easier to spell than Schwarzenegger, Beth. ;) The recall election in Kariforunia has been big news here in Japan, too, because Shuwa-chan was running for it. And, now that he has been elected, it has given a very interesting phenomenon. That is, most of the Japanese now know who the California govenor is, while nobody seems to know the name of, say, the Hokkaido governor. Wow.
Also, his name could give the Japanese media a hard time for the time being. For a headline, 「シュワルツェネッガー氏」(Mr. Schwarzenegger) seems to be too long. I've already found 「シュワ氏」(Mr. Schwa) in some newspapers. Of course, "Shuwa-chan" is very popular on Japanese TV, uh, kinda.
Youthful energy in abundance? Yeah, cheerful 7th graders, Amy (left) and Chris. They are really good students, I mean, studying English eagerly, getting good grades at school, and, yeah, chatting away merrily.
Did you ever have this experience as a little kid? You have a dream that you are in the bathroom peeing, and wake up to find yourself in the wet bed. Well, I did.
Yesterday, fifth graders were enjoying talking about bed-wetting. They were amused to know they'd had similar experiences of wetting their bed after having those dreams.
Feeling amused as well, I approached them and asked this funny boy nicknamed "Ben," "When was the last time you wet the bed?" To which he answered, "It's when I was in third grade." He's a truthful kid.
Then, he said he had had a "prophetic dream."
"I dreamed about going skiing. In the dream, I fell down. After having the dream, I actually went skiing. I looked around, and purposely fell down to make the dream a prophetic one!"
Come on.
You'll be a big shot in the future, Ben.
Ooooops. I almost messed up my blog.
The thing is, I moved this blog site to a different server at the same web hosting company I'm currently using. I figured the moving wouldn't be a tough job since it's not that I'd change hosts, and so everything should be going well without changing any settings of CGI programs. Well, I should know things wouldn't go that easy. I simply transferred all the files to the new server and checked the pages. Everything seemed to be displayed all right. The hosting company responded quickly, and informed me that my domain name had been successfully moved to the new server.
Done!
No.
Rudolf kindly let me know yesterday that the comment feature on my blog didn't work. I hadn't noticed that. Worse enough, although I tried to log on to the MovableType, the sweet program turned me away. Yikes! I read the MT help, and found the trouble could be from "different versions of the Berkeley DB library." What the heck is that Berkeley DB library thing? To fix it, the help says, I should access the shell of my server, and run some UNIX commands. Wow, no thanks! And before that, my host doesn't allow its users to use telnet access for security reasons, though I don't even know if the telnet thing has something to do with solving this problem. I was stuck. Yay! Huh?
So, what did I do? I decided to build my blog from scratch. Fortunately, MovableType has import/export features. I used them. That worked. Yeah.
If you tried to post comments in vain during that time, I have to apologize. Yeah. Really.
Phew.