Report from Greater Tokyo

Call it a blogging chain letter if you will, the format is the same but the only penalty is less visibility. None of that your life will be unlucky blah blah blah nonsense. Just add your url to the bottom and post it to your blog.

• Minding the Planet
• Ales Rarus
• Report from Greater Tokyo
• Your link goes here

This has to be the funniest thing you can do with the Sims. EVAR.

I'm going overland to Thailand with a couple of friends and quite a small budget. I don't want to have to fly straight home a week after getting there and so was hoping to find some TEFL work to take me up to summer. I've just graduated from university (physics) and have no TEFL experience or qualifications. (UK, native English speaker)

Will it be possible to find some work in Asia starting in say febuary to last till say June or even shorter term? is such short term work available for inexperienced people?

...

Any help grately appreciated!

This is one of my pet peeves. It bugs me that people want to enter a profession knowing that they are unqualified for it, and having no intention of gaining the appropriate qualifications. Now, I admit I am far from the best teacher in the world, but I try my best.

Sorry. But if you want me to take your profession seriously, please take mine seriously and get qualified before you try to enter it. There are ways to teach while unqualified, but it does nothing but lower wages and encourage employers to take professionals less seriously if unqualified people enter it.

Ah yes. I meant to write about that didn't I? Umm, will this do instead?

Today was a parents' day. Unlike the UK where parents meet the teachers after classes have finished, the parents come in to the classroom and get to see their little darlings being taught. This naturally requires that the timetable be re-arranged to optimize the classes for the parents' benefit. Not that I worried today, as none of my classes were observed. Instead, I got to observe another class along with the parents. On the downside, I will be taking over that class, increasing my workload by a bit.

Later, we got a kanji lesson, in which we practiced writing the "English" kanji. Our best efforts will be on display during the school culture festival for all to marvel and laugh at.

Moulton woman says she lost job for sporting Kerry sticker on car - Woman fired from job for having a political bumper sticker on her car.

Charges Dropped After Man Arrested For Small Tip - Man arrested for not leaving a big enough tip.

Anyone else think things are a little out of balance there? As an addendum to the first story, John Kerry later phoned her and gave her a job, but it still shouldn't have happened in the first place.

Just finished moving house, and I'm back after what must be the shortest hiatus ever. I went to the computer store about getting Internet set up again. Apparently, I am not allowed to just transfer over my new details on my account. Oh no. That would be too simple. Instead, I have to close my old account (which I am still using, as it is tied to my phone number which remained the same). Then I have to open a new account.

This does of course entail getting another three months of free access as a new customer. It also means I have to get another ten thousand yen worth of discount at that computer store. All together, that means they have been paying me an average of GBP 17 a month for Internet access. Yes, that's right. For the last and next 3 months, it works out that I am receiving money to surf the Internet.

I am not complaining at all, but I do sometimes wonder about their business model.

We just had an earthquake a couple of hours ago. All I felt was the building shake a little (hey, I am on the 6^th floor, at least for now), but it seemed to last a while. According to USGS, it rated a 7.0 on the Richter scale. I suppose I'd have felt a lot more if it had been closer to Tokyo. As it happens, Kawagoe-cho, where I was last year, can expect a small tidal wave. Probably just as well that I moved from there.

Update: We had a second one in the same area just before midnight, and about as strong. Folks, don't worry, I'm fine. The Earth moved, that's all.

Oh Brother, More Stuff on Stem Cells from Ales Rarus, a Christian website. Here's my response.

On the medical science issue, once upon a time, it was considered sacriligious to cut open a human corpse. Early doctors' methods were notoriously unreliable, and early post-mortems were unlikely to either find the exact cause of death or provide immediately useful data for medical research.

However, although no one knew exactly how that research might be beneficial in the future, we know now that it was invaluable to almost every modern surgical technique.

Similarly, although we don't yet know which way stem cell research may take medical science, and we don't even know of any specific benefits, but it seems reasonable to believe that there will be some tangible medical benefit in the future. If the anti-stem cell research people had won back then, modern medical surgery would still be at the amputate and cauterize stage. Stuff as basic as resetting a broken bone would be life-threatening, and almost certainly result in long term problems.

I'm about to move house again. It's into a larger apartment in the same building, so no major moving costs are involved. However, I may be offline for a while. Hopefully not as long a hiatus as last time.

Probably an urban legend, seen on a discussion board I frequent. Enjoy...

A young woman, Yoshiko, met a nice young bachelor and got married to him. Lovely person, but the one thing she found a little odd about him was that he would never talk much about his past - what his life had been like before he met her. It didn't seem to be that much of an issue, though.

One day, when she had been married for about a year or so, she couldn't find her new T-shirt, so she went looking through all the cupboards for it. It crossed her mind as she searched that she always seemed to be losing things these days - clothes, underwear, books she was reading.

Any way, as she looked though the back of a cupboard, she came across a couple of large, plastic boxes. They were locked. "It must be something of Masa's" she thought, and put them back.

As she turned to go out of the room, an overwhelming urge to look inside possessed her. She went to the kitchen and got a Stanley knife, and forced one of the boxes open.

The box was full of love letters, meticulously ordered and stacked. They were love letters between Masa and another woman, who Yoshiko had never heard of. They were dated over a few years, stopping a few years ago. Next to the letters was a neatly sorted collection of the woman's possessions - clothes, CDs, underwear, cards, bus tickets... things which must have belonged to the woman. A marriage certificate showed that Masa and this woman had been married several years ago. At the rightmost end of the box, a death certificate stating that the woman had died in a fatal car crash.

Yoshiko picked up the Stanley knife and opened the other box. This box was similar to the last one, except that the name of the woman in the letters was different and they were dated a few years later. Again, the collection of clothes and other random personal objects, all obsessively arranged in chronological order, and the marriage certificate. Sure enough, the last item in the box was a death certificate, stating the woman's death from a domestic accident.

By now, Yoshiko was feeling shocked and afraid, at such bizarre behaviour and at finding out that her husband had a secret past he had hidden from her. She managed somehow to jam the boxes shut, and pushed them back where she had found them, right at the back of the wardrobe. As she did so, she found one more box, identical to the other two, but a little lighter. Unable to bear not knowing what was inside, she took her Stanley knife once again and slowly forced it open.

It was full of her own possessions. The letters she had written to him, cards she had sent him, books and CDs she thought she had mislaid, her own clothes and underwear. The t-shirt she had been searching for was among them. So was her marriage certificate.

The box was about three quarters full...