indessed roscivs

As many of you may know, I am now the proud owner of a new iPhone. In fact, I’m typing this on an iPhone right now (mostly to see how good the iPhone keyboard is, and whether it can keep up well with my thoughts—so far it seems to be doing a surprisingly good job).

I’ve been wanting to buy a smartphone for some time now, and after seeing the Japanese capabilities of the iPhone I decided on it—even though I think I’d be more likely to write, say, Java code for a handheld device than Objective C. Unfortunately, AT&T didn’t make it easy for me. Since I already had a contract with them, they wanted $400 for an iPhone (as opposed to the more usual $200). I’d have to wait until June before my “upgrade period” made me eligible to pay the normal, subsidized price.

Further delaying my plans, I discovered that Apple was having a developer’s conference the week after my upgrade period started—I didn’t want to miss out on anything they might be announcing, so I waited another few days to see what was coming out. In the end, I’m glad I waited—they dropped the price of the iPhone to only $100, making it an easy purchase (especially since work will pay for the monthly charges).

So far I’ve really liked the device, despite it having its little annoyances. For example, even though the kana Japanese input is great and easy to use, there’s no real kanji input—you have to use the Chinese modes, and some of the characters are slightly different. I also wish it had an optional stylus to make drawing characters easier on my wrist.

The web browser, too, leaves a lot to be desired. I think I’m most surprised about this, seeing as how I’d used the iPhone’s browser previously and been impressed. And, truth be told, most of the time it’s just fine. But when you’re using the browser constantly, the times when it can’t figure out where you’re trying to click, or decides to go gallavanting off to some other page while you’re trying to scroll, can be extraordinarily annoying. Furthermore, I think I’m spoiled by the speed and customizability of Opera. Sometimes I just get really annoyed at not having every feature I want right at my fingertips.

I’ll keep you posted on my thoughts on the device as the days pass. I’m sure I’ll find even more to like, even more to hate, and probably more than a little to be surprised at.

As many of you may already know, I’m planning a trip to Tokyo next month. I’ve been there once before, but for business—this will be the first time that I actually get to do what I want to do while I’m there. Mostly what I want to do is speak Japanese and play Go, but I’ll probably do a little bit of sight-seeing as well.

Yesterday, I made reservations at the ryokan we’ll be staying at. I was terribly nervous—they didn’t have an email address, so I had to make the reservation over the phone, and my Japanese conversation skills are shaky at best. (Speaking of which, I just received the results from the Japanese Language Proficiency test I took in December. I passed! 90% in writing, 80% in reading, and 60% in listening. That’s about what I expected, and enough over the 70% minimum requirement to pass handily. This year’s goal—JLPT 3!)

So, in preparation, I wrote down the entire dialog as I imagined it would go, along with other vocabulary words that I might need, just in case. I added the phrase for, “Do you mind if I speak English?” in case I got stuck—I figured in a foreigner-friendly ryokan they’d at least have one person who spoke English. Even so, I nervously kept putting it off until finally I managed to bite the bullet, pick up the phone, and dial the international number. I took a deep breath and mentally prepared myself for what was to come, as I heard the click on the other line as the phone was answered.

“Hello, Kimi Ryokan. How may I help you?”

I noticed some surprising things as I was learning the lyrics to Konayuki. Usually, when I’m learning a song, the chords are the most difficult part—lyrics are memorized easily. But when the lyrics are in another language, that dynamic changes considerably. The only difficult part in the chords is a change from D to B minor—other than that, I can play along with the mp3 at full tempo. But the lyrics, this time, are a little more of a challenge.

I experimented with a few different forms. The chords I found online had the lyrics in romaji—for example, “konayuki mau kisetsu wa itsumo sure chigai”. I also tried putting them in hiragana—”こなゆきまうきせつはいつもすれちがい” for the same phrase. But it turned out that the easiest way for me to read the lyrics fluently was using kanji—粉雪舞う季節はいつもすれ違い—albeit with furigana (very small hiragana above each character). In this form I found the text very easy to read and understand—and keep in the correct rhythm.

When singing in any language, there are natural places to extend certain syllables or compress others in order to accomodate the melodic flow of the notes. When singing in your native language, you don’t even notice when you do this—it’s simply a natural extension of speaking, even if you would never actually speak that way. But when singing in another language, you often find that they compress or extend in places that seem strange to you.

The one that always gets me in Japanese is the dipthong “ai” (like in the English word “ice”). If, for example, I have four notes, but the Japanese text says “naikedo”, I imagine I have to extend one of the syllables, since there are only three syllables, right? Wrong—Japanese breaks up the dipthong into two syllables: “na” and “i” (rhyming with the English “pa” and “he”, respectively). This sequence occurs several times throughout the song (with, confusingly enough, the same sound being compressed into a single syllable elsewhere, when necessary), and I almost always got it wrong. But strangely enough, when I abandoned the romaji, it became much easier and natural to find the correct moments to pause and continue.

The final anecdote from my song-learning experience concerns a word in katakana. When katakana is used, it almost always represents a borrowed word—most frequently, from English. The particular word in the song was “a-su-fa-ru-to”, and in the song, accented on the second syllable. Normally, after understanding some basics of how English words get transformed into Japanese, it’s pretty easy to figure out a word based on the katakana. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what this was supposed to mean. Finally, after singing through the song several times, I gave up and checked the dictionary. Turns out it was the emphasis throwing me off—the English word is “asphalt”, and if I’d simply emphasized the first and third syllables instead of the second, I would have got it instantly!

The season when powdered snow dances always passes by …
Powdered snow, if you paled me, white to the heart,
Could you share our loneliness?

The song 粉雪—konayuki—was featured in a Japanese television drama entitled, “One Liter of Tears”, based on a book of the same name. It’s not so much a book as a diary—it was written by a young girl who was diagnosed with a fatal disease when she was fifteen years old. She writes about the daily events of her life, which include the normal activities of a teenager, along with the difficulties unique to struggling with such a disease. The diary was published when she was twenty-three—two years before she died.

Powdered snow, if you paled me, white to the heart,
You would wrap around our loneliness and send it back into the sky

I’m not sure I could handle reading the book or watching the series—it seems just too sad for me to manage—but I love the song. It has simple chords, so it’s easy enough for me to play, but the lyrics are moving and the melody stirring. I’ve been practicing it all weekend long.

Powdered snow, this heart that has transcended time is faltering

It’s a beautiful song.

A couple of years ago, I was searching for some Japanese music to listen to. However, as I had just barely started learning Japanese, I wasn’t sure how I could go about discovering new artists without knowing much Japanese (or even being able to type Japanese characters). On a lark, I decided to try searching for the word クリスマス—Christmas—because I figured, (a) there would be a lot of songs with the word “Christmas” in the title, and (b) it was easy for me to type because it was a completely phonetic word.

My brilliant plan didn’t work out very well, unfortunately. It turned out that most songs I downloaded were actually by American artists, simply labeled in Japanese. (Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas” was apparently very popular in Japan.) I found a few interesting songs, but didn’t discover any smashing new artists whose sound I really enjoyed. Or so I thought.

Last September, I was cleaning out my downloads folder when I came across a video file I had never seen before. It had a huge filename and was obviously mislabeled with dozens of keywords one is likely to search for—one of which, I realize now, must have been クリスマス. I watched the first few seconds of it, but being short on time, simply relabeled it “Japanese Music Video”, since that’s what it was, and filed it away for another day.

Last Saturday was that day. I was cleaning out my downloads folder again, and came across the file and decided to take the time to watch it. I found it strangely moving, and (now armed with a little better grasp of the Japanese language) quickly discovered that it was called 粉雪—konayuki—and was written by a band called レミオロメン—Remioromen.

According to the Japanese Wikipedia page, the band’s name is a made-up word, consisting of a fragment meaningful to each of the three main band members. The “re” comes from the member named Fujimaki, who was fond of the band “Radiohead” (re-di-o-he-ddo in Japanese). “Mio” is from the member Jinguuji, from the name of the girlfriend he had at the time. And finally, “romen” is from the member Maeda, who took it from the Japanese word for streetcar, “romendensha” (literally road-surface electric-car).

The name of the song was “konayuki”—powdered snow. It was fitting, then, that this morning I awoke to freshly fallen snow upon the ground—as if I’d been calling it to me all weekend long.

CNN posted an article today entitled, “Bloody Monday”—referring to the host of layoffs that major companies have been announcing due to the recent economic downturn.

The final week of January began with a bloodbath for the job market, as over 71,400 more cuts were announced on Monday alone.

At least six companies from manufacturing and service industries announced cost-cutting initiatives that included slashing thousands of jobs.

More than 200,000 job cuts have been announced so far this year, according to company reports. Nearly 2.6 million jobs were lost over 2008, the highest yearly job-loss total since 1945.

Back in October, people were comparing the stock market crash to that of the Great Depression—but it seems odd, given our perceptions of the events of that time period. Our lifestyles didn’t change much in the last three months—we didn’t have a lot of capital tied up in the stock market or the housing market, so when things dropped we were relatively unscathed. But even looking around, it doesn’t seem like the Great Depression at all. Was it really like this back in the ’30s? A graph of the stock market crashes over the past hundred years shows that the current recession is looking depressingly similar to that of 1929—it’s certainly worse than any crash since then. But it doesn’t feel like a Great Depression, does it?

Well, I decided to look up a Great Depression timeline of events. Perhaps the poverty and destruction of wealth we associate with the Great Depression didn’t happen immediately in the few months after the stock market crash, but took longer to manifest themselves? Perhaps this is what it was like three months after Black Tuesday—nobody really thought it would be a big deal, and weren’t directly affected by what happened initially. timeline says that, after a few months, not much had happened:
[T]he Federal Reserve has cut the prime interest rate from 6 to 4 percent. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon announces that the Fed will stand by as the market works itself out: “Liquidate labor, liquidate real estate … values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wreck from less-competent people”.

By the end of 1930 (the equivalent of our end of 2009), the GNP had fallen 9.4 percent from the previous year. The unemployment rate had climbed from 3.2 to 8.7 percent—nowhere near the 15-20% unemployment rate we typically associate with the Depression. (In comparison, in December 2008 the unemployment rate rose to 7.2 percent. I don’t know what it will be at the end of January, after the fallout of “Bloody Monday”.) I’m not sure what the GNP or unemployment rate will be at the end of this year, but I don’t see 1930-type levels as being unrealistic.

1932 and 1933 were the worst years of the Great Depression—the equivalent of our 2011 and 2012—with GNP falling 31 percent compare to 1929, and unemployment at 23.6 percent. Industrial stocks had lost 80 percent of their value since 1930. 40% of all banks that existed in 1929 had gone under.

What will our 2011 and 2012 look like? Obviously the market has some “adjusting” to do. Will it finish its adjustments by the end of this year, and be on its way back up soon? Or is this only the beginning, with 2009 looking positively sunny compared to what is yet to come?

President Obama (yes, it really is President Obama now) was inaugurated yesterday, and millions around the world were watching. But some were even watching from outer space:

http://venturebeat.com/2009/01/20/pictures-president-obamas-inauguration-as-seen-from-space/

I’ve been poking through the indessed logs recently, to see how many people visit this site, and why. One of the interesting things to look at is the list of Google queries that bring people here—I’m on the first page of Google hits for a surprising range of interesting terms.

While not on the first page of Google hits, one interesting search query that has brought people to indessed has been the word “shishkaberries”—an apparently uniquely Seattle-ish treat of overpriced fruit stuck on a shish-ka-bob stick.

So, in attempt to be helpful to all those Google visitors searching for information about Shishkaberries, here’s my Shishkaberry Roundup:

The New Awesome experienced Shishkaberries the same place I did—at Bumbershoot, the awesome music festival held at the Seattle Center every year. For a whole weekend, you get to lounge around in the rare Seattle sun, listening to all sorts of music—from rap to rock to folk and back again.

Meanwhile, The Stranger complains about Shishkaberries at the Seattle Mariners games—apparently the sign says “Shiskaberry’s”, not “Shishkaberries”, offending the apostrophe sensabilities of the poster, Anthony Hecht.

The WhySeattleSportsSuck blog has a different take on the Shishkaberry subject. Their beef is that for five strawberries, you have to shell out five smackers—that is to say, one buck per strawberry (ignoring the delicious chocolateyness topping them). The author asserts that “this is why we’re in an economic crisis—banks lending out money they don’t even have so customers can run around willy-nilly throwing stacks of money off of bridges and paying a dollar for a strawberry.” Overpriced fruit kabobs representing the fundamentals of our econoomy? They might be on to something …

Summer of Matt also posted in the sports groove, but in a more positive note. He lauded the surprising variety of food available at Safeco Field, which apparently goes beyond the usual hot dog and nacho fare present at your typical stadium. Apart from Shishkaberries (”the coolest/most unique thing [he'd] seen”), he also mentioned garlic fries, BBQ, sake, and sushi—including the “Ichiroll”, a spicy tuna sushi roll named after the Seattle star, Ichiro Suzuki.

All this talk of food is making me hungry. I think I’ll go fix myself a snack.