Weekend Update - January 1st

Weekend Update
Well, I survived New Year’s Eve.

That was easy to do. I was in bed and asleep before 11:00 PM. I did not wake up at midnight so I guess that it was quiet at the building.

With the cable damage in Taiwan last week, my Internet traffic volume from my acquaintances in China has fallen off. It also fell off because the students who practice their English with me are off on end of term holidays. I suppose if you went to Shanghai with your boy friend, posting on the Internet or chatting with me would not be very high on any list of things to do.

Visitors
December was a surprisingly good month for visitors to the blog. Usually, the visitor count drifts off in December. I think the fall off has something to do with other activities of the season and the fact that I don’t have as many postings up for the month.

We had a total of 505 visitors this month. This is the second highest visitor count. I do appreciate all of the visits.

We had visitors from Canada [6], Texas [5], Japan [5], Sweden, Poland [2], Czech Republic, Belgium, Spain [4], India, Serbia & Montenegro, Italy, Nigeria, Hungary, Taiwan, United Kingdom [3], Finland, and Hong Kong.

There were two curious visitors who stopped by for 38 minutes to read seven pages and 36 minutes to read nine pages.

There were three looker visitors who read twenty five pages in seventeen minutes; nine pages in three minutes; and nine pages in two minutes.

My Friend Sharon
I found out why my friend Sharon has not been returning my phone calls on Friday. Sharon sent me an email and said her personal cell phone has been broken since December 10th.

That explains a lot.

Sharon asked me to call her on her business cell phone. Easy to do if I had her business cell phone number; I didn’t ask for the number since I didn’t want to make personal calls to a business phone number. My cell phones are all 310 Area Codes and her business phone is in the 909 Area Code, about seventy miles / one hundred ten kilometers away from the beach. Hard to explain a business related call that was so far out of the local area.

I replied to her email and said I didn’t have the business phone number. Maybe she will send it to me this week.

DVD Shopping
I went to DVD Planet on Saturday to pick up some new DVDs. Mostly; I picked up some obscure ones that most would not purchase. I bought BOOGIE NIGHTS and JU-DOU and four others.

American Football Games and Tournament of Roses Parade
I was watching some of the American football games on Fox, the ones who brought you “fair and balanced news.”

I wish they had hired someone who knew what they were doing to manage the college football game broadcasts. The announcers cut away so the audience could hear the combined Auburn and Nebraska bands play. Sweet. The announcers shut up and that was nice but someone forgot to turn on the microphones so we could hear the bands.

Then, all of the American networks have female sideline reporters. For the most part, they know very little about the game of American football. They tend to ask inane questions like, “coach, what are you going to do better in the second half?” asked of the coach whose team was trailing in the score.

My first guess for an answer would be play better.

Can you imagine a female reporter asking a soccer coach in the middle of a World Cup match or the cricket coach in the middle of the Ashes Matches what he was going to do better in the next portion of match? Never happen.

During the Tournament of Roses Parade, the local announcers tended to talk over the bands so you can’t enjoy the music. Did I care what type of orchids went into making the tops of the Joshua trees?

I think not. I would have loved to hear the high school band from Pennsylvania that was marching in its first Tournament of Roses parade. That would have been much better for me.

The Tournament of Roses Parade is a not so clever marketing campaign that illustrates why living in Southern California is so great. Today was sunny and almost warm 65F / 17C with no clouds in the sky or snow on the ground. People in places like Denver and New York and Chicago, where it is cold and snowy, see how nice it is here and want to move out to California. Thus, adding to our already crowded highways and bringing more poor drivers out here.

I guess my frustration all boils down to this observation. Who decided that we will all benefit from having no moments without announcer noise?

Woman of the Moment
It is nice to start the Woman of the Moment for 2007 with Kyoko Hasegawa. I watched her weekly dramedy last night. Dramedy is a word that Doug coined; it is a combination of comedy and drama.




Komyo Ga Tsuji
I watched my Japanese historical drama Saturday night. I wanted to see if the leading actress survived the assassination attempt that closed the previous episode. Chiyo survived the shooting. This is a photo of Lord Yamauchi and his wife Chiyo.

This was not a big surprise. She was shot with a matchlock rifle from well beyond the rifle’s effective range. The rifle was lethal for about thirty meters and hardly accurate at any distance. The bullet was largely a spent shot when it struck her. It was like she was hit and had her breath knocked out. The thick garments effectively stopped the bullet.

The province began a descent into chaos amidst a reign of terror that probably could have rivaled that of the French Revolution on a smaller scale. It got so bad that she left her husband at the end of the episode.

I should point out the samurai lord, Yamauchi, is caught between a rock and a really hard spot. His master, Lord Tokugawa, wants the province pacified quickly and does not want to hear excuses and explanations. If Yamauchi is unable to pacify the province, Tokugawa will replace him with someone else. This would be the end of the Yamauchi clan.

Not the best of all worlds to be in.


That was the rest of my weekend gentle readers. I hope you celebrated New Year’s in a responsible manner and did not suffer too harshly on Monday.

Be well and stay happy.