It’s just really high res blood … right?

January 5th, 2009 by Joel | Posted in life | No Comments »

I ran across this article today in The New York Times about the Army using an arcade to try and recruit (and inform and educate, of course) kids in urban Philadelphia. According to the article, the Army is using the arcade, which contains as its center piece a massive $13 million simulator, to appeal to the urbanites who typically don’t sign up for the military. The article says that the simulator lets the kiddies perform a variety of roles on a mission of humanitarian aid to either Iraq or Afghanistan. The Army Experience Center website certainly shows people in the simulators having a great time blowing stuff up. Seriously. Go see for yourself. You can choose between air assault (in a Black Hawk), urban combat (in a Humvee), and the combination of “the thrill of flying with an intense combat scenario” (in an Apache).

Okay. We need the Army. And recruitment hasn’t been the greatest the past few years (although the Army surpassed their 80,000 target last year). But is that the way to recruit kids and young adults to serve their country? I say “kids” because the recruiters made it very clear that they’re not taking anyone under 17 years old. You know, 17, the age when you can vote and buy cigarettes and visit the more risqué establishments and pick up a six pack of Bud Light on the way home. Oh, no … wait. No you can’t. You’ve still got a year for most of those and three before the last. You can’t even get married without your guardian’s permission in the state of Ohio yet. But you’re definitely old enough to go kill people and blow stuff up and watch your buddies get their guts shot out.

I’ve played video games since I was a kid. I’ve played just about everything from Atari on up. During that time, I’ve played lots of military and shooting games, most of which contained quite a bit of pixelized blood flying around. I’ve even played some of those really graphic games where limbs go winging off into the environment (a la Dead Space). But none of these games, none, has even brought me within a mile of what it’s like to actually get shot at, let alone to shoot somebody else. Using another, albeit more expensive video game to get people to sign up for the military hardly seems like truth in advertising to me.

Oh, and just in case $13 million military simulators aren’t your bag, you can plop down in their gaming lounge—yes, the Army has a lounge in their recruiting center—and level up your character in World of Warcraft. Again, I’m serious. I can’t make this stuff up. You can go to the Army arcade lounge, play some video games, chat with some plain-clothes recruiters, blow some crap up in the simulators, and maybe, just maybe, decide to be a soldier and go defend your country. You know, if the virtual bullets and flames just aren’t enough excitement anymore.

What really bugs me is that—again, according to the article—while playing the simulations of helicopter attacks and street combat in a Humvee (and it looks like a lot of fun in the pictures), “the participants do not come under fire.” How many “intense combat” scenarios have you heard of where those involved didn’t have to duck? Don’t get me wrong, if I lived in Philadelphia I’d be headed over to the Experience Center to play that massive simulator. I’d play all three missions if I could; at least once. But as soon as I was done I’d be right back out that front door. Unless the bullets and flames really are virtual now. Then I might just shave my head and get that rifle after all.

Bureaucracy & Work News

January 5th, 2009 by Joel | Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

We were up at 6:30 this morning. However, it wasn’t from jetlag this time. No, Chiharu and I had to head to that singular institution which is probably just as bad no matter where you’re from: the DMV. Of course, it’s not actually called the DMV here, but just the same, there were lines, there were more than a few perturbed individuals, and there was certainly a bit of waiting to be done by us. Adding to the torture was the fact that all beginning and relatively new drivers are required to watch a safety video. A two hour long safety video. Fortunately, Chiharu was only renewing her license, so no road test was required, just a suspiciously superfluous eye exam (which she past with flying colors, despite the fact that the contacts she has right now are too weak and need to be upgraded). I’m just beginning to dread the day which is coming soon when I get to sit through the same lovely video and then do a few laps through their parking lot course full of orange cones and road signs.

After the DMV, we headed over to the city office in order to register my presence in Japan as a resident alien. Once the application goes through, I’ll receive my “gaijin card”—the official alien registration card mandatory for all foreigners staying in Japan longer than 90 days—and then I’ll be official. We also took care of entering ourselves into Japanese national health care plan. That’s right, Japan’s got socialized health care. It’s not like Canada, though. In Japan, the socialized health care is typically for the unemployed and students and such; most full-time employees receive insurance through their employers. Chiharu and I’ll be socialized at least until April, which is when my job starts.

Yup, I finally landed one. I’ve been accepted by Siebold University of Nagasaki as a native-speaker English instructor in the Department of Global Communication. I’ll be working under a contract for one year, which can be renewed up to two times, if both I and the university approve. The Siebold campus isn’t in Nagasaki city proper, but is located just north of there in a town called Nagayo-cho.Thus, Chiharu and I’ll be heading there later this month to check out the campus and the faculty housing. We should be staying in our own apartment with a subsidized rent of about $300 a month. The job itself won’t begin until April first, when the new school year begins.

For now, we’re still staying with Chiharu’s folks and taking care of other odds and ends. Tomorrow we’re headed to the eye doctor, but not until after I watch the Fiesta Bowl with the Toledo Hensleys via webcam.

Go Bucks!

Back to the Land of the Rising Sun

December 30th, 2008 by Joel | Posted in life | No Comments »

Well, as of around midnight Monday, Tokyo time, we’re officially back in Japan. We left from Detroit around 2:45, which was only about an hour late; you know, not too bad for Northworst Airlines. The flight took less time than scheduled, though, and we arrived at Narita Airport around five o’clock in the afternoon. After transferring to another flight and driving from the airport, however, we didn’t make it to Chiharu’s folks’ until about midnight.

Thus far, we’ve visited, had some insanely good sukiyaki–compliments of Chiharu’s mom–and purchased some cell phones for ourselves. We entered Chiharu’s folks’ family plan, so I didn’t get to spring for an iPhone or the like (the G1 isn’t available here, unfortunately). Instead, I ended up with a Sony Ericsson RE:

I’ve always disliked bulky cell phones, and I’m really liking how thin this one is. The 3.2 megapixel camera isn’t too shabby either.

The night we got here, we slept about eight hours (I never sleep on the flight; it’s physically impossible for me), but last night, after lapsing into unconsciousness in front of the TV around 10:30, I woke up at 4:30 this morning and have been awake ever since (thank you, God, for Nintendo DS). It should be fun attempting to stay up late tonight for New Year’s. One must soldier on, however, if one expects to get any of the sushi that’s been ordered for tonight.

At the Hop(e)

November 9th, 2008 by Joel | Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

So, America just elected its first black president. We’ve taken a rather large step in a new direction as a country and, after just one hundred forty-odd years since slavery was abolished—you know, just a short century-and-a-half of discrimination, segregation, riots, and violence later—the United States has decided to hand the controls to our first African-American commander-in-chief.

Except, he’s not.

I may very well be the only person in America who thinks this way, but isn’t there anyone else out there that thinks it’s weird that everyone’s calling Obama “the first black president”? Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t he half black and half white? Yes, of course I think it’s great that we’ve made it to the place as a country where we can elect someone who is not a rich white guy to run the show. I hope someday America gets to the place where we can even elect someone who looks like Benazir Bhutto, if that would be the right person for the job. But every time someone on the news, white or black, says that Obama is the first black president, something inside me cringes just a little bit.

Am I being too sensitive? Perhaps. I am one half of an interracial/international marriage; thus, our kids will be mixed, half white American and half Japanese. And I can’t help but get the feeling that, if it were my spawn who was president-elect, and all I heard on the news was that said spawn was going to be the first Japanese president, I think I would feel just a tad bit slighted. I mean, of course I would be extremely proud if the fruit of my loins made it to the White House, but if the entire population of America was systematically robbing my child of a full half of his or her heritage and upbringing, I would be a bit miffed.

After all, didn’t Obama spend a good portion of his childhood with his mother’s family? I’d say he’s just as much a product of their upbringing as he is his father’s side.

That being said, I think referring to Obama the first black president is irritating for another, possibly more serious reason. Obama continues to be rightly hailed as the new face of American politics. His campaign was unlike any that had come before. He’s captured the minds and, to quite an extent, the hearts of people all across the board. As cheesy as it sounds, when I watched Obama’s victory speech last Tuesday, I was moved by the sheer diversity of the crowd, both age and color. Obama has done something to America which may really be for the first time, at least as far as 52 percent of the voting public is concerned: he’s crossed borders. Sure, he talks about “reaching across the aisle” in Congress, but where his true strength lie during the campaign was his ability to break through borders of all kinds.

How did he do it? It has to be, at least in part, due to his mixed heritage and upbringing. He’s seen all sides of America: white, black, rural, and urban. How many candidates before him can claim that? We live in the United States of America, right? For the first time in our history, we will soon have a president who is a direct product of our racial diversity and mixed ways of life. Why would we want to rob him of that? I’m not saying we should take away from his historic election as the first non-white president; it was just that, historic. But does the fact that he’s half black and married to an African-American woman just make him black by default? When I have kids, will the fact that they’re half Japanese just make them Asian by default? Good lord, I hope not. In the midst of one of the worst economic times in our nation’s history, when Russia looks like it wants to relive the good ol’ days of the sixties, we need a president we can all get behind. Hell, we need a president who can just complete a few sentences of intelligible, coherent language without giving Letterman more “Great Speeches” material. If we’ve come to the point where we can elect a man who is of mixed decent and has darker skin than all we’ve elected before him, shouldn’t we celebrate all of his heritage that brought him to the point where he’s about to assume the mantel of leader for the next four years, instead of just half of it? Shouldn’t we be happy of the fact that there’s something about our next president we can all get behind? Or, after all the campaigning which is now behind us, is it too much to hope that we can cut through the sensationalism and recognize our next president for what he really is?

La Fugitive Rampion

November 1st, 2008 by Joel | Posted in teaching | No Comments »

This week in my intensive reading and writing class we were talking about gender roles and their stereotypes and how a culture imbues the same on its children. One of the subtler ways in which this supposedly occurs is through fairy tales. According to the author of our textbook, fairy tales are absolutely rife with negative stereotypes of females; apparently, the ratio of male characters to female is something like 11:1. How accurate this number is–or where it came from–I can’t say. It seems more than a little unbalanced, since most of the stories have at least one princess/maiden and witch/enchantress roaming about

One of the fairy tale samples given in the textbook was the story of Rapunzel. I think most Americans and Europeans have heard this story before; I certainly had. But, as usually seems to be the case, the version I heard when I was a kid seems to have left out a few things. First off, did you know that Rapunzel is named after a plant? It’s okay, I didn’t either. There’s a plant family native to Europe and Asia known as Rampion. In the original Rapunzel story, Rapunzel’s birth parents get into a bit of trouble when the husband sneaks into the neighbor witch’s garden to steal rampion for his wife. When caught, the father cries for mercy and agrees to gain access to the garden in order to take all the rampion his wife can handle in exchange for his firstborn child. I can’t imagine what the guy was threatened with to agree to forking over his newborn daughter, but it must’ve been pretty nasty. Anyway, rampion, I’m told, is a popular addition to salads in Europe. Maybe it’s just that good.

Next, after the prince figures out how to scale Rapunzel’s tower and their plans are ruined by the witch, Rapunzel is hauled off to a desert where she delivers twins (yeah, I bet you don’t remember Rapunzel and the prince making whoopie in the tower, do you?) while the prince tries to off himself by jumping out the tower window. Apparently, he’s built like a cat though because the only injury he sustains is having both eyes gouged out by a bush. Long story short, the prince wanders blind and half-starved for years through the forest until he reaches the desert where Rapunzel is being the single mother of their two kids. He’s healed through the magic of Rapunzel’s love-induced tears and they live happily-ever-after, of course, but man. Those Grimm brothers were rather vindictive.

I’m still wondering what eating rampion is like, though. I don’t know if we have it here in the States, but if someone knows it by another name or where to get it, let me know.

July thus far

July 12th, 2008 by Joel | Posted in Uncategorized, teaching | No Comments »

Well, I said I’d write when I completed the website for work (the first draft, anyway), so I am. Both the English and the Japanese versions are up, so knock yourself out and try poking around both. The one thing I’m wanting to fix on the site right now is the index page. It was thrown together rather quickly and the design is pretty much a complete rip off the Honda Worldwide site (minus all that pretty Flash, of course). But hey. I knew it’d be temporary, and sometimes it’s faster to pilfer than it is to sit down and force myself to work on something a bit more original. (I say a bit more because, let’s face it, I went to school to be an English teacher.) Anyway, except for the page with the language selection buttons, most of the rest of the site is functional. If you do take the time to head over and check the site out, make sure you check out the Location page. Google offers some really cool stuff for small businesses; and it’s all free. The map is a custom size and the driving directions come from their Business Solutions. What’s more, you can’t see it, but Google Analytics will give you a script to embed in any page on a site in order for you to check what kind of traffic it gets. They have all kinds of neat charts and percentages they give. What I like the most, though, is the map feature that shows you how many hits you’ve had on any given day from any country in the world. Case in point, the KLC of Novi home page has had two hits from Brazil and one each from Chile and Venezuela. Who’d a thunk, right?

Today was also my first experience administering the TOEIC (see the June 11 entry for more). There were only a few test takers, which was nice, but it was an odd feeling being the one at the front of the room reading the directions and making sure all those bubbles on the Scantron answer sheet were filled in completely. Remember the SAT and/or ACT from high school? Remember having to sit there and listen to all umpteen pages of anal-retentive instructions being read to you by that math teacher you just couldn’t stand? Yeah, that was me up there reading today. I’d rather not say things have come full circle, but it was a slightly surreal feeling.

Last weekend Chiharu and I headed back home for the Fourth. We got to see the Maumee/Perrysburg display from inside Fort Meigs, right near the river. I thought the display started a little slow, but they threw enough chest-rattlers and shaped ones in that it was still pretty entertaining. The finale made the quest for parking and the long wait to escape Perrysburg worth it, though. Someone even had the cajones to time the finale to the 1812 Overture. It was nice hanging out with Mark and Rocky before and especially after the fireworks. We even got a few hands of Hearts in while we were waiting [Rocky was a beast]. Matt brought along Julie from work (for the fireworks and for the cookout the next day) too, so she’s well on her way to becoming part of the fold. Friday we had a cookout. And I mean a cookout. Three massive flat iron steaks, two buckets of potato salad, a mystery bag of Doritos, handmade hors d’oeuvres (courtesy of Steve), a Devil’s Food cake (courtesy of Tony and Deanna), a massive bowl of fruit salad (courtesy of Alex), and a wonderful patriotic desert (shot 01 shot 02) (courtesy of Chiharu) later, we were stuffed. After dinner, Matt got the fire going, and we had an excellent time sitting under the stars. And it was a perfect night for a fire. I believe the final tally was 13 people. All-in-all, it was a good night. [ fire ]

If you’ve checked out any of the above pictures, you may have noticed Matt’s mug as well. Last weekend, after months of growing it out, he had me chop off the beard that had people asking him if he was Amish (twice while he was working at a video game store and ringing up their purchases on a computer). The two pictures (here and here) were taken for posterity.

robin + 13 Ghosts II

July 12th, 2008 by Joel | Posted in play | No Comments »

Rain + I Ghosts 1

June 30th, 2008 by Joel | Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

for the sake of

June 11th, 2008 by Joel | Posted in life, teaching, work | No Comments »

It’s been far too long since I wrote something, and since I have some extra time today, I might as well. Why do I have some extra time, you ask? Well, I’ve been working at Koby Language Center, a language school in Novi, Michigan, for the past five months now. The school was originally established in Ann Arbor, and the location where I’m at was opened last November. Anyway, the school’s been undergoing major renovations–as in the creation of new rooms by means of walls which weren’t there before, new carpet, entirely new network and phone lines, and more–and said renovations are nearly complete. The next step is to receive approval to become a certified TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication) testing center, which we have. So this Saturday I’ll be heading to KLC of Ann Arbor to observe and help proctor the TOEIC at their school in order to see how it’s done and prepare for administering it at KLC of Novi come July.

That’s not all that exciting, though, so that’s about enough of work. I just received word that my brother has created a blog for reviewing all things media. The link is in the Blogroll to the right, or you can click here to head over there right away. I’d love to be able to do the same thing, but I just don’t have the time or cash flow to enjoy lots of movies and games and what not these days. So, I’ll leave the reviewing to Matt and just point you to his little corner of the Interweb.

Sadly, that’s about all I can think of to write at the moment. Oh, with the series of storms that blew through the Midwest this past weekend, the building where I work was without power until about three in the afternoon on Monday, so “working” for five hours in the dark with no air conditioning in a largely silent ghost-like office building was fun. At least the power came back on before I had to teach that day, so I didn’t have to do so by sunlight through the window.

Speaking of work, I’m almost finished completely redesigning the website for KLC of Novi, so when it gets finished, I’ll let you know. [The site that's up at klcnovi.com at present was made from a template provided by the hosting company back in February.]

Okay, time to finish my coffee and hit the showers.

Gallery move to Flickr

March 9th, 2008 by Joel | Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

In the previous incarnation of this site, I uploaded all the thumbnails and images separately and manually, photo by painstaking photo. This, I feel, is not the best use of my time. Thus, I’ve been searching for a better way to handle the quantity of images I’d like to have on the site, and I think I’ve settled on something that will work. When you click on the Images link, a new window (or tab, depending on your browser of choice) opens and directs you to my Flickr page. There, you will be able to browse through all my photos, by set, by tag, or even by searching for a specific photo by title or description. This should make it much easier to locate photos for you, as well as easier for me to get them to you more quickly.

Flickr, for those who may not know, is a site which provides space for creating your own free online image galleries. You can upload to Flickr from your computer, cell phone, or handheld device, and Flickr organizes your photos automatically by using the Tags and Set information you give for each picture. It’s free for all to use, but in order to do so you must sign up for a (free) Yahoo! email account. This is a minor annoyance, since I don’t use Yahoo! and never have, but unfortunately necessary. Still, creating the Yahoo! ID is quick, just don’t forget what your user ID or password are.

Additionally, the Yahoo! ID becomes necessary if you’d like to post comments on photos which are on Flickr. You can browse all the photos (at least, all the photos people have made public) on Flickr without a Yahoo! ID, you just can’t do anything else. Something to note, Flickr, of course, limits the amount of space and uploads possible with the free account, allowing only three Sets and about 95MBs of data. As you may have observed already (you alert little bugger, you), I have resized all the photos I upload to be a maximum width and/or height of 600 pixels. This means two things: one, faster load time for you when you’re trying to look at them; and two, I get to upload far more photos than I would if I uploaded them using the size at which my camera takes them. (Case is point: My camera–a Fujifilm Finepix F710 I picked up in Japan three-and-a-half years ago–stores photos at a width of about 2,800 pixels. This allows for nice, detailed images, but it also means each file takes up roughly 2.75MB on my computer.) Thus, if I uploaded all my photos at full size, I would fill up my allotment on Flickr rather quickly.

However, because I’m uploading photos at about 20% of their original size, I get about four photos for the price of one. What that means is, I’ve uploaded 68 photos thus far for the month of March (Flickr limits your uploads by calendar month) and am sitting at 17% of my quota. So, if my math is correct, I should be able to upload 400 photos per month; more than enough to keep myself busy, I think.

Anyway, instead of laboriously uploading all the images and thumbnails myself, I’m letting Flickr do the majority of the work for me. Flickr even provides various uploading software you can download for free which makes it even easier to upload quantities of photos simultaneously. This makes it very nice for me and should give you more to look at. Let’s hope this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Here’s looking at you, kid.