is like a book you can never stop writing – and which it is a daily struggle to create content worth filling the pages with. Whoever might someday pick up the book of my life might want the skip the couple of pages which I’ve just filled more or less completely with Ginormo Sword.

Ok, I’m sure this makes sense to the Brits, as it’s a road sign, but me the foreigner can’t figure out what exactly it’s supposed to mean. So, if you’re going coming along, your uni application in your hands, and then you pass this sign, do you suddenly just go: “Sod that! I’ll just grab a pint instead!” Don’t know.

But I do know this won’t end well.

I bought this lighter in an off-licence in Chalk Farm last weekend. Since they keep them behind the counter, the guy just grabbed one, showed me that it worked, and sold it. It was only later that I noticed the image on it.

I’ve made up my mind that all cultures have certain code language they use when called upon to preserve the social fabric in the face of otherwise untenable illogic. In the US, generally low standards and specifically not presuming to tell others how to act even in the face of clearly destructive behavior come down to the concepts of individuality and personal space – to a certain extent, and I feel this in myself, words like “it’s just a personal choice” and “it’s his prerogative” can justify practically anything.

I semi-often hear the phrase “決まり”(kimari) or “決まっている”(kimatteiru), meaning “a decided matter” or “it’s decided” used to put the final nail in the coffin of a dispute, or just to nip it in the bud. My inner interpreter/grammarian tag team recognizes this as that weasily, buck-passing passive voice and demands silently, “by whom?”, but honestly it makes no difference whether you know who “decided” this matter in the first place or not since odds are he’s miles above you on the Japanese scale of who to consult on matters needing deciding. It also doesn’t matter what the objective facts of the situation are, as it’s a well-known (and not in dispute) fact that facts and the whimsy of your social betters are often strangers. It just so happens that people treat social standing much more literally here, so much so that the “fact” of a matter being settled by someone above you is worth more to a lot of people than the “fact” that W isn’t actually written with 4 strokes.

Yes, that’s actually what I was asking about the first time I heard and questioned the wisdom of granting settledness omniscience. An old boss of mine was trying to make the kids at her school (and hence my old students) write W with four strokes – down, up, down, up – and marking it wrong if they did it any other way. When I pressed her that this was basically handicapping the kids for the sake of a standard that’s only followed in Japan, if anywhere, she said it was 決まり and … well that’s about it. When I asked by whom, she said “by Japanese”. I don’t remember much else, so I guess that must have been when my brain burst.

I also ran into this when querying an acquaintance why yahoo.co.jp’s vocabulary games gave “Japanese food” as the opposite of “Western food”, when everyone knows it’s the really the opposite of Algonquin food and nothing else. Again, sigh, it’s a settled matter and changing that requires a lot more seniority in the Foreign Ministry, Bureau of National Identity, Department of Narcissism/Self-loathing than it requires any intellectual curiosity or critical thinking skills.

And no, not the tourists walking by you loudly talking. I saw this “telectroscope,” which is actually a pretty cool idea, just outside London City Hall recently. Apparently, the original plan was to dig a tunnel to connect London and New York.

That not being entirely feasibly coupled with modern satellite technology, and now you have the ability to look into the telectroscope and see New Yorkers wave back at you. To be honest, I think this is rather cool, even if I didn’t stand in the long queue to get a good look myself.

On Wednesday, I flew from Budapest to London with Wizz Air, the most unfortunately named airline in existence.  I caught a flight with them instead of EasyJet, because Wizz Air, while being a bit more expensive, arrived three hours earlier into London.

Now, Wizz Air delayed me once five hours about three years ago, and have since only managed to be on time once when I flew with them. So, I can’t say I was shocked when my flight to London Luton airport was delayed by three and a half hours.

The kicker, however, is in the picture above. That EasyJet plane? That’s the cheaper but “departing later” flight I didn’t take, and it’s taxiing toward the runway for take off.

Last year’s comedian famous for exactly one phrase and exactly one move:

This year’s:

It’s kind of like the early career of Jim Carrey, if he had been a different comedian each year each playing only that role, and his act had consisted entirely of getting on stage and saying “(varying preamble) Alllllllrighty then!” and making a funny face for the camera at the end.

It’s hard to tell if the people behind these acts really only have that one ace up their sleeve and no proverbial hand of cards to play what most people would call “comedy”, which to me involves at least the pretense of and potential for improvisation; or if marketing forces have simply sheared off all save whatever is memorizable to everyone in Japan ages 4-whoever is currently the oldest person in the world.

A quick exercise in the sun salutationesque flexibility of the English language:

Look around the room, making a short mental list of the nouns that name the things you see around you.  How many of those nouns are also verbs which describe an action with an obvious relationship to the noun they’re homonyms with?  How many are verbs which describe an action without an obvious relationship, or one that’d take some effort to explain to a second language learner?

Just picking the first 10 nouns I see,

cup – to cup – easy enough to visualize, but doesn’t use the object in question

card – to card – quite specialized

phone – to phone – easy.

key – to key – hopefully none of my students will have to learn this one.

hand – to hand – easy at first but bedeviled by a host of phrasal verbs like “hand down”.

foot – to foot – as in a bill.  This makes no sense.

monitor – to monitor – easy for native speakers, hard for people who only know a monitor as part of a computer.

list – to list – easy.

note – to note – easy.

wall – to wall – easy.

I never realized what a gift the supposedly simple grammar of English was.

I have no idea where I found this, but I love it.

Visual is not a style of music, much in the same way Butter-Flavored is not a style of film. If you declare your band to be “visual kei”, you’re trying to legitimize as genre convention the act of selling out by placing image ahead of music. Selling out, by the way, is not something to be done ostentatiously, unless you have a very fundamental misunderstanding of what the “Black Album” means in the vernacular of heavy music.

Your fans are adolescent girls so demoralized by society that they refuse to accept anything but a rubber-banded-till-it-falls-off feminized male figure as a fantasy. Grow (or reattach) a pair and reconnect with reality, and hope your fanbase follows suit.