Your weekend treat: everything you ever wanted to know about dating in Japan. The fun comes, of course, from the fact that everything here has a kernel of truth in it. Starts slow, but stick with it….

I tried to avoid posting Lin Yun Chun… I really did…

Like everyone else on Earth, I was frankly stunned (and a little creeped out) by the chunky twerp and his spot-on Whitney Houston performance, but this is a blog about language learning, and darnit, I’m not going to succumb to trolling for easy traffic bait…

Sorry, everyone.  A blogger has his limits…

The pairing with William Shatner makes for the most epic performance in human history…  My friends, this is what the internet television  music was created for!  As Just Jared puts it, “This is epic epic epic!!!!!”  Prepare for television history…

BTW- This is also definitely the only chance I would ever have to link to Lopez Tonight.  To paraphrase Chris Griffin from Family Guy, the show only reinforces the stereotype that George Lopez is funny…

Long time readers know that I have a fondness in my heard for the goofiness and quasi-sadism of Japanese game shows.  Enjoy!  If you don’t speak Japanese, don’t worry.  You’ll still quickly get what’s going on, and the humor is in seeing the reactions….

Ranked high in the list of disturbing TV pranks (and, frankly, Japanese shows comprise at least 80% of my top list!)…  The thought behind the prank is simply awesome in its simple effectiveness, yet somehow the brutal reality still managed to just sit badly with me.  I still had to laugh out loud when the action started, however…

If you don’t speak Japanese, don’t worry.  Just wait, and everything will become abundantly clear at the 43 second mark.

There was an instance where an incorrect past participle caused a lot of confusion. One of our missionaries was attacked by a large dog. An ambulance came to take him to the hospital, leaving his new missionary companion to run on foot, about a half-mile to the nearest church member’s home. Breathless, this new elder who still struggled with the intricacies of French, babbled excitedly about a big dog and that his missionary companion had been bitten. The problem occurred when he used the wrong past participle: mordu in French means bitten–mort means dead. Over the next several hours, a series of unfortunate phone calls made their way across the Atlantic Ocean to Church headquarters. Luckily, they were able to get things sorted after mistakenly notifying the elder’s parents that he was dead.

This is from last August!!!  How did I miss this???!!!  Click here to watch…  (For the record, his pronunciation is as bad as one would expect, but he’s a TV clown, and he knows it…  He keeps is the poise we have come to expect from Mr. Roker…)

Should one assume that English-only proponents know how to spell English words?  Maybe not…

15 new entrants to the Oxford English Dictionary…  I’m errrr underwhelmed…

These, of course, are the goofier of the newly-established words in the English lexicon, not a total listing.  Still, as the article states, such words being granted the legitimacy of the Oxford press does make one “fear for our future.”

Given that I only recognized about half of these terms, I guess it’s official that I’m no longer young and hip (ok, I was never actually hip)…  I guess the fact that I switched from watching MTV to VH1 some years back should have tipped me off. Another decade and I’ll probably eat exclusively at Wendy’s…  The next stop — Country Kitchen Cafe…  Sigh!

Tenuous language connection, I admit, but very funny, and utterly amazing.  A good language workout for students of Japanese, and those who don’t speak/study Japanese will still get the premise and the point.  Basically, just a demo of how to streamline your morning “get ready for work” routine.  My wife and I spent ten minutes working on the tie bit which I’m definitely fitting into my life (those 3-5 times a year that I actually find myself socially obligated to wear a tie, that is).  The wife is demanding that I formally acknowledge that it was she, in fact, who figured it out…  To be honest, I got a bit of a “mercy pass” on Cub Scout knot-tying activities.  Anyway, I got it from Allahpundit, so give him so traffic.  He’s got some great observations on the nature of why Japanese television concepts like this just wouldn’t work in US culture, as half the appeal is what he terms the fun of watching WTF culture…  I’m not completely convinced, as Japanese are completely in on the joke (i.e., you don’t have to be watching from outside the culture to find this funny).  I think it’s merely a matter of Japanese self-depreciation taking forms that Westerners would never dream of, and voila, instantly comic and unreplicable…

Nowhere near as good a “translation” or as funny as ‘Benny Lava,‘ but as I understand the actual Chinese, I still found it pretty amusing…