Archive for January 2004
Milk tea is best
I like tea with milk very much, both hot and iced. I have it for lunch almost every day. Some of my friends say having lunch with such a drink is strange, which may be true, but for me, it's the best policy. Of course a lunch with green tea will do, though.
Not only with lunch but with any sweets or snacks, tea with milk agrees very well with me. In a beverage corner in a store, I choose a bottle or can of tea with milk almost every time. Once in a while, I choose black tea or tea with lemon for a change, but much less frequently than tea with milk.
The reason why I like tea with milk so much may be that I like milk. Since the age of fourteen, I've been drinking half liter of milk every day because it would make me taller due to its calcium and its vitamin D that helps the body to absorb calcium. Drinking milk, I have come to like its taste. Increasingly, my purpose for drinking so much milk a day is enjoying the taste, not the calcium.
Some of you might say that canned or bottled Japanese tea with milk such as Gogono Koucha (Japanese web page only, sorry) contains so much sugar and calories. I think it's true and I think so, too. But to me, it doesn't matter. One thing I should say is that I like milk tea with less sugar and fewer calories as well, but how much sugar the milk tea contains is not a big deal to me at all.
Honesty is the best policy. In addition to that, milk tea is the best policy for me. What is your best policy? Or dou you have any policies for yourself?
Mountain Weather
Yesterday I went to Tsu, the capital of Mie prefecture, to take the TOEIC test.
In order to come back to Nabari, I crossed the mountains called Aoyama Kohgen. It was sunny in Tsu and I didn't care about the weather in Aoyama, which was very stupid of me. It was snowing heavily there and the surface of the road was all white. Near the top, all the cars stopped moving. I wondered what was happening. After a while, I found that there had been an accident, and finally the cars started very slowly. It took more than two hours to come back here -- It usually takes only an hour.
I should have taken another route. Think about the weather in the mountains!
ESL/EFL Weblogs
Topics, a web site which describes itself as "An Online Magazine for Learners of English," has just put up an article on how to Create Your Own ESL/EFL Weblogs. Tawawa is listed on the Viewing Weblogs page of that article.
The word "blog" still makes me wince. It'll be a long time before I get used to "edublogger."
Header Images
Thanks to yet another effort of our code monkeys, the header banners on Tawawa's three main pages now sport portraits of students who participated in this site from its early days and who still contribute to it.
Each time you load -- or reload, for that matter -- one of these pages, the server pulls a random image from the stack. Currently there are seven pictures in rotation, but there's no reason why there shouldn't be more. Send them along if you've got images that should, could or might be included. We'll pass them on to the monkeys.
A Weblog is Like a Washing Machine
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo is one of the sharpest and most clear-sighted commentators on American politics who ever ran a weblog. A trained historian and a journalist by profession, he has a firm grasp of current affairs and an admirable knack for analysis.
This week, he was honoured with one of The Week magazine's first annual opinion awards. While he usually sticks to politics, he went out of his way to tell this little episode, which happened after the awards ceremony when he met one of his personal heroes, the renowned historian Arthur Schlesinger, and found it hard to give an account of weblogging:
To be polite Schlesinger’s wife asked me to explain to them just what a blog is. And though I get this question pretty often, it turns out to be a rather challenging one if the people you’re trying to explain it to don’t necessarily have a lot of clear web reference points to make sense of what you’re saying.
I ended up telling them that it was something like political commentary structured like a personal journal with occasional reporting mixed in.
Now, as I was explaining and watching the looks on everyone’s faces it was incrementally becoming clear to me that this was playing rather like saying that something was like a washing machine structured like a rhinoceros with the occasional sandwich thrown in. And, as Schlesinger himself had said rather little through all this, it was also dawning on me that being one of the four guests of honor at this little event was providing no guarantee against making a bit of a fool of myself.
I have to define weblogs practically every time I tell somebody about Tawawa, and it's never easy. Even David Winer has a hard time saying what makes a weblog a weblog, and I'm not sure he actually succeeds. I believe that the best theory of anything is its history, so I sometimes find myself telling the story of who did what and when, and who introduced which piece of software and what that software did to shape the practice of weblogging, etcetera and so forth -- it just tends to go on for a bit.
So maybe it's more useful to stick to comparisons: a weblog is like a big party thrown at somebody's house with a bunch of conversations going on at the same time. A weblog is like a diary, except that it's indistinguishable from a diary. A weblog is like a web directory, except it has fewer dead links and better commentary on those links, and more timely links anyway, and, above all, it orders those links chronologically instead of ordering them by subject categories. A weblog is like a Japanese breakfast with miso soup, pickles and rice, except you don't run the risk of having natto served up with it.
Les Miserables
Les Miserables is a novel written by Victor Hugo. I'd heard of the title but never knew the story until a couple of days ago. NHK broadcast the drama from January 1st to 4th, and I liked it very much. I think that French novels are like poetry. The characters' lines include beautiful metaphors and similies. There are also religious teachings or precepts.
As for the drama, it was really interesting. There was one of my favorite actors: John Malkovich. Some may know him from Being John Malkovich, which is also a good movie, I suppose.