I found this nifty site that offers all this free software and proficiency tests for foreign languages. I took the French and Russian tests and am very happy with myself. ADVANCED in French and ADVANCED INTERMEDIATE in Russian, which is almost advanced so whatever...the downside is that now I'm crosseyed and can't look at any letters without my head spinning because of the shitty Russian font that smashes all the letters together...but whatever! I got my ego boost for the day! The japanese test gave me a headache...maybe this afternoon...

www.transparent.com

Dawkins uses this as a sort of case study for how (and how quickly) religion starts up and spreads. It fits in pretty well with Chomsky (whatever I still hate him) and Pinker's view as well...Even if you don't care about all that stuff it's still fucking fascinating.

the wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cults

some pics

An airplane,  for worshipping or some such thing

A fake military procession If you look closely you can see "USA " painted on the  peoples' chests

A fake airport A bit fuzzy but the best I can do.

I hope I'm not the last person on earth to have learned about this...
 

I sure do hate this woman:

Coulter, Ann, Godless: The Church of Liberalism. From the book jacket: I couldn't have written about evolution without the generous tutoring of Michael Behe, David Berlinski, and William Dembski, all of whom are fabulous at translating complex ideas, unlike liberal arts types, who constantly force me to the dictionary to relearn the meaning of quotidian."

To start...You're supposed to be a fucking writer!! To continue...oh fuck it. Just look up her first "evolution" tutor's name on wikipedia and bitch for yourself.

It seems everyone wants to think that the language they speak is the hardest language on earth. I find this annoying. I don't know if it's a matter of pride or what. In every country I've ever lived in, without exception, someone has seen me flipping through my piles of index cards and came up to me to offer their condolences, for their language is the hardest on earth to learn. I was lectured on it in Russian by Russians, in French by French people, in Chinese by chinese people and just yesterday, in Japanese by japanese people. It gets really old.

That being said, I especially enjoyed the japanese approach to this tired problem. You see, having forgotten to bring my speaking and grammar book all week, I decided to dedicate myself to learning the Japanese readings of the chinese characters I already know. No small task, but hardly the most difficult thing I've ever done (130 down, 1,370 to go!). I was sitting up in the smoking area studying and was approached by several people from my office, who asked what I was doing. I told them and thought to myself, "Oh great. Here it comes..."

Imagine my shock. There was no lecture. They merely exclaimed that that was cool and said it was hard, then they did something that I didn't quite expect. They chatted among themselves for a few seconds. "It's hard isn't it?" "Yes, very hard." "Yes, it is so." "hard." "That it is." (Stating and restating the obvious is a charming and annoying feature of Japanese pragmatics.) Then they took the cards and started quizzing eachother. One person would look at the card, look confused, then show it to their friends and ask, "Do YOU know this one." Then the other person would say the answer, all the while acting like he thought he was correct but couldn't be sure. Did I mention that I was learning the readings of kanji for things like "bird," "suitcase," and "almost?"

I'm sure it was done for my benifit, but it was nice to see people assert their pride in their language's complexity without being arrogant or condescending. It also got me to thinking about what the most difficult thing in a language is. I don't want to be unfair and say that Russians or French people think too highly of their language, however I would like to encourage a fair and balanced view of language difficulty. In this spirit I made myself a list of the hardest things about every language I studied.

FRENCH: plus-que-parfait du subjonctif...It's not that I don't know it, it's that French people don't even use it. I had one professor who was fond of flourish and insisted that I NOT avoid subjunctives (There are tons of ways to do this that sound much more natural and less pedantic)...and wouldn't give higher than a C+ if there were any grammatical errors. This led to hours hunched over my grammar manual checking every sentence and many more hours in the language lab with his other students helping them make sentences out of "obscure" literary tenses they'd only been taught to read. I got her back in my term paper for my first graduate class. The working title was "Traditional French Pedagogy, its effect on language learners, and why those who practice it should be shot." I changed it before presentation, but the spirit remained the same.

GERMAN: Those freaking strong verbs.

RUSSIAN: The evil P's of Russian...Prefixes and Punctuation. I loved my Russian professors, but always wished them just a little harm when they returned my papers with "po-"s and "pro-"s and "vy-"s and hundreds of commas written in red ink. Six years later, I've almost got the hang of it.

LATIN: Why Julius Caesar saw fit to put nouns and the adjectives that describe them on different sides of the sentence, I will never know. Sometimes languages die for a reason.

JAPANESE: Why the Kanji, of course. Antiquated and ineffecient, I'm just glad I learned the chinese ones first. They are, however, useful when deciphering frat-boy tatoos.

CHINESE: Homophones

ENGLISH: If you ask me, it's the easiest language on earth.

Funny thing o' the day:

Hayashi: And you have a class with a handicapped student for twenty minutes.

Me: What's his disability?

Hayashi: uh...thinking.

I work in a dull place, there’s no doubt about it. I’ve not yet experienced board of education life during the academic term, as I had the good fortune to arrive during winter break. This means that I’ve been spending my days at a desk in the Yakumo Board of Education just ten minutes from my house, studying Japanese and staring at a computer screen.
There have been some work related tasks. For a couple hours each of my first few days I was escorted by my supervisor and the head of the BOE to various places around my city, though I’m confused as to which ones I will actually work at. I’m sure that the various institutions they call middle schools will be on my agenda, but then why have I been taken to a dairy farm, a hardware store, an archeological site and several gyms and then been made to introduce myself to all the Japan-folk milling nearby?
I would assume that this is so the local people aren’t confused by the presence of a strange foreigner in their sleepy town, but I think that the newspaper article and photo being printed in the local newspaper this month would have cleared that up without wasting so much gas. Alas, I can only come to one conclusion: the people I work with are just as bored as me.
These little trips have given me some interesting memories of my first few days in Hokkaido. At the archeological site my supervisor told me all about the interesting Ainu artifacts the workers had been finding, and she could have told me a lot more if it hadn’t taken us fifteen minutes to figure out that one of the object in question was called a “doll” in English.
At the dairy farm I met a very nice Japanese cattle wrangler with a back injury. While my supervisors and he chatted away, I slowly became aware that I was being watched…not by a cow, but by a teenage girl with a video camera. The farmer noticed her too and told her to come out, explaining that she was a film student from Tokyo who was preparing a documentary on farming in Hokkaido for her thesis.
The farmer then gave us a tour of his land with the film student following us and filming all the while.
“Naturu, Naturu.” She kept saying, which I think means “natural.”
“Natural” for me mostly consisted of staring straight ahead in silence. She asked me a few questions about myself, the normal “Where are you from?” “How old are you?” “Do you like Japan” deal.
My shining onscreen moment came when we reached the barn. I noticed that the cow pens were very unevenly populated. One held seven or eight white baby cows, and in the other was a single brown cow. I thought the brown cow was really cute and I asked my supervisor why he was separated from the others.
“Is this cow sick?”
Satoo San, my boss, thought for a minute. “No,” She said, “These cows are…for milk, and this cow is…for eating.”
Unless I’m edited out of the final cut, a group of Tokyo film professors and students will get to see me waiting until the farmer and my bosses have wandered out of earshot, then reaching into the pen and scraping the hay away from the cow’s mouth while trying to give him some sound advice. “Don’t eat! Tabenaide! And Run. Joggingu! Lots of joggingu! Diet and Joggingu mean no for eating!”
A few more days of boredom in the office, then my supervisor discovered that I was a newly licensed driver. How did she discover? I told her, but she was more than happy to find out because it meant a new excuse to get out of the office. One of the higher-ups has decided that I need to practice driving the BOE car (I’m not allowed to drive my own) before the school year starts. Practice, however is a term I apply loosely. I usually don’t even drive the car during these sessions.
The man who takes me driving cracks me up. His name is Akai San, and he is the chief of the Yakumo Board of Education, though you might not know it to look at him. He never wears a tie or collared shirts, and his feet are usually clad in white socks and Jesus sandals. He seems to work hard, but spends a lot of time cracking jokes and fanning himself.
When we have our driving lessons, he drives me to wherever he’s decided to go (usually a town office or school) then takes me into the building where the office workers present seem very surprised to see him. They say their hellos and chat for a few minutes, then he sits down on the couch and tells somebody to bring him coffee or tea and relaxes for twenty to forty minutes. When he finishes his drink, he sometimes jokes with the people in the office some more or tries to get me to go on a date with one of the secretaries…the funniest thing about that? Yes, he knows. It was written on my application.
Sometimes the people in whatever office we go to try to entertain me. While raiding the refrigerator and the local library, one of the managers walked me out to the stacks to show me Yakumo’s wide selection of books in English…about twenty children’s books about puppies and angels. I said that they looked great and smiled, but the manager stood by, anxiously grinning from ear to ear. He then picked out one of the books himself, handed it to me, and asked me to read it right there while he waited.
Fortunately, there was some sort of cataloguing emergency that called him away before I could get Jesus’ first appearance and I was able to make my way back to the office, where Akai san was dozing peacefully on the couch.
If nothing else, Hokkaido has been a much more relaxing place to live than Moscow.

I just need to vent. Okay, here goes. to do list, past present and future.

July 5th: flew from Moscow to Prague to New York to Albany. 30 hours.
July 9th: Drove to Vermont where there was no electricity or running water and started practicing for my road test, which I promptly failed because I only had three days to practice and hadn't driven a car in 6 years and I'm an awful driver.
July 18th: failed test, flew to charleston where I bought more plane tickets and had no time to rest until
July 23rd: flew back to vermont and started practicing again. Other things to do: get money, send in frequent flyer miles, drycleaning, repack, get international driving permit and retake driving test.
july 28th: fly to atlanta and make it to the hotel by 3pm. Act all genki for the predeparture stuff
July 29th: Fly to Japan. Destroy all evidence of prescription sleeping pills I bought in Russia before leaving by drugging myself into a state of utter oblivion on the plane ride...

And maybe when I wake up I'll be in Japan.

I've gone over to the dark side, and now I'm plugging it.

I recently picked up Night Watch, a science-fiction fantasy horror novel that is extremely popular in Russia. I've seen a lot of people reading it in the metro and my students told me that it would be easy to read (if you're studying Russian I do not suggest STARTING with Tolstoy, as it will take you forever and make you hate Russian forever) and I'm sorry to say I love it. It's not especially deep, but it is entertaining.

So, if you're looking for an easy read about the forces of good and evil having it out on the streets of Moscow, I suggest this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1401359795/sr=8-2/qid=1148321675/ref=pd_bbs_2/102-7673269-0775311?%5Fencoding=UTF8

Thus far I have not bitched too seriously about being placed アスファーキングノウェル、北海道、日本 however today I feel I will let off some steam...though not so much about my placement as the state of mail in the world. I gave my BOE a simple request, and though they have not responded yet I have a feeling they won't be able to do it (not by any fault of their own). I asked that some information they want to send me...I assume a welcome packet of some sort...and I asked them to send it using a service like FedEx or DHL or something like that. I remembered adam saying that that was not possible to do this where he lived so did a quick search. Sure enough the only FedEx location nearby is in Sapporo. I then looked at the Japanese post office site to see what they offered and they do in fact have a priority mail service...that doesn't service Russia. I suppose that is understandable, but I had to skim the list of other countries.

Azerbaijan? A little strange. I guess it was an important stop on the silk road, though my Russian students are afraid to go there and I think that says something.

Ghana? Sounds facinating but I couldn't help but notice the repition of the words "indescriminant terrorist attactks" and the subsequent phrase "could happen at any time" on the fact file.

Rwanda??? RWANDA??? Do I need reason to voice my surprise? I'll give them Ethiopia without a fight but fucking Rwanda?

Looks like I'll be bribing the post office clerks again. Joy of joys.