TEFL (and) World News 28 Aug 07: Semi-communication
It seems Japanese semi (cicadas) interfere with communication not just by making it difficult for me to hear Youtube, but by actually boring into fiber-optic cables and laying their eggs in them. If someone would only write a haiku poem about it, that would make the “Japan is a weird mix of the new and old” cliche complete!
Meanwhile in the Japanese J League football tournament. Actually, who cares about the J League?? Next!
Where the action is really at is in the Pokemon world championships:
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/14/america/NA-GEN-US-Pokemon-Championship.php
If you think kids back home went crazy for Pokemon you have seen nothing. This summer they had a “Pokemon stamp rally” in Tokyo, which basically means travelling from station to station to station to station filling a book with rubber stamps from each station forecourt. That must be the ultimate proof of how Japanese parents indulge their kids. Can you imagine anything worse than spending your August holiday crammed in the Yamanote circular line and then queueing with 20 more kids with Pikachu hats to get your hands on a rubber stamp??
And maybe only Pikachu can save us from another Japanese recession:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=ahsH0SqcUUVM
Putting my “having to say something about this in Business English class” hat on, it really wouldn’t surprise me to see Japan in recession again. To start with, nothing has changed since the last one! At least we can rely on Shinzo Abe to appoint someone corrupt enough to take our mind off it for a while…
August 28th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Ha ha that Pokemon thing is amazing - i didnt know it existed. But im also not so surprised. IHT lose points for poor subbing and proofreading tho.
“The senior division rivals played the longest with a long time during which each held the other at bay with no prize cards drawn.”
That’s as good as a thread I saw on that ESL forum last night titled ‘Where you accepted at Nova?’.
Proofreading is a curse, but I loves it.