The Annals of Stupid Foreigner Mistakes

When I was putting together yesterday's blog post, I completely forgot something which is funny enough that I must correct my error.

I glanced around the arcade yesterday at Posful and found a nifty litte drumming game I wanted to try out. It was a lot more simple than the Konami one, so I figured, "Why not? I'll play it once." Well, game starts, and a name entry screen pops up. It took me a moment to figure out what it was, but when I did, I was like, "Oh, OK," and tried to put my name in. I messed up on the controls for that and ended up putting in を as the first character of my name -- a character which you never, ever see in names.

I was gonna try to fix it, but decided not to bother after trying to navigate the Japanese alphabet and just hit enter three times on the character I landed on. The result was をっっっ. Not, for those of you who can read this, をつつつ, but をっっっ. For those of you who can't read this, all I can tell you is that this is about the most ridiculous thing I could put in for a name. It doesn't even have a real pronunciation; the closest I could come would be an exceptionally crappy kung-fu yell.

I then accidentally picked beginner mode and proceeded to rape the top score. I almost doubled it, subsequently earning をっっっ a place on that arcade machine for a long, long time, if not forever.

Carrying on to today, I elected to spend some time this afternoon watching 24. The DVD players were as badly off as I recalled, and I didn't feel like moving to the big TV, so I ended up watching broadcast television. I didn't know I could access that in the library until today, when I turned the TV on and realized I needed to hit the TV/Video button to see the DVD. When I first started watching TV, it was all commercials, being right around the change of the hour. I eventually settled on a random station and kept working on some NPCs for my D&D world (as I'd been doing during my failed attempt to watch 24).

The TV show ended up being coverage of someone's post-wedding interview. Boring, I thought, and went to change the channel. The next channel had the same exact thing. As did the next. And the next. Only one channel wasn't covering this wedding, and that had a sumo tournament. I was tempted to watch the sumo tourney, but decided that since this wedding was on every channel, I may as well try to figure out what was up with it. Turns out that it was the Japanese princess's wedding. Oho. After the live broadcast of the interview was over, the different channels turned to discussing various things related to the princess and/or her wedding. Some of them talked about various gifts she received, including a [beautiful] set of 5 cups costing a total of 100,000 yen. I also got to see some footage of her from when she was around middle-school age; she had glasses and acne. Proof positive that royalty are still people.

The random channel I'd settled on resolved to some womens' show before I left. They had a guest who had discovered a way to make food that wasn't gyoza, but amazingly tasted like gyoza. I don't know why it was so amazing, but for some reason her way of making a food that tasted like gyoza without being gyoza was awesome.

After that I got off to koto class. ^^ I'm getting much better at reading the music (all in kanji) and the lyrics (hiragana and katakana) at the same time than I used to be. Makes me happy. Unfortunately, the range of the instrument doesn't fit the range of my voice very well; the top two strings are a little to high if I sing in my upper range, and I can't sing in my lower range as unthinkingly as I can my upper range. Bah! Humbug.

Anyway, off to watch some Firefly. Woooo-hoo!