月別アーカイブ：2018年5月

You can find a vending machine on nearly every street corner in Japan. These vending machines sell all sorts of refreshing beverages and some even sell soup! But…what do you do after you’ve bought and consumed your drink? Trash cans aren’t quite as easy to find to throw your garbage away. You might feel tempted to leave your plastic bottle on the sidewalk and simply walk away, but that action can have dire consequences for our environment!

According to an article on National Geographic, “[m]ass production of plastics, which began just six decades ago, has accelerated so rapidly that it has created 8.3 billion metric tons—most of it in disposable products that end up as trash.” Wow! Did you know that 91% of the world’s plastic doesn’t get recycled? Plastic ends up in landfills and even in the ocean! It has a devastating effect on wildlife. Scientists have predicted that by 2050, the ocean will have more plastic waste than fish. It’s up to us to help keep our home planet free of pollutants.

If you’d like to learn more, please read this very eye-openning article about the dangers of plastic. 

Hard

As an adjective, hard can mean: 

The opposite of soft:

• Wood is hard.

The opposite of easy:

• The exam was hard.

Something involving effort:

• Running a marathon is hard.

As an adverb, hard can mean:

Doing something with energy:

• She works hard.

To use force:

• He hit the ball hard.

One of my favorite things about English (or any language) is how small differences in pronunciation, speech pattern, and vocabularly can you tell you where a person is from without even having to ask!

The United States is riddled with different accents and the way people speak can vary drastically just by travelling a few hundred miles into a new state or even within the same state (e.g. those in southern Texas sound a little different than those in the northern part of the state). 

I think accents and dialects are fascinating, so at home I often try to speak in different ones (even though I’m terrible at it). Here are a few of the more unique ones to be found in America, with a few (stereotypical) words and phrases you can try out:

Boston Accent: Instead of pronouncing the r’s in “Where did you park the car?” change them to an ‘eh’ sound, which becomes “Wheh’d you pehk the keh?” 

North-Central (Minnesota, upper Michigan, the Dakotas):  This accent sounds very friendly and similar to some Canadian dialects. It often makes ‘o’ sounds longer and rounder than they are in other American accents. For instance, Minn-uh-sota (Minnesota) sounds more like Minn-uh-sohda, with the lips taking on a rounder shape at the ‘oh’ part of the word. Likewise, ‘Don’t you know?’ becomes ‘Dontcha noh?”

Southern: Although the southern accent varies greatly from state to state and even city to city, most of them employ what is called a vowel shift. Where ‘standard English’ words with ‘i’ in the middle sometimes result in an /ay/ or ‘eye’ sound, in the south this becomes more of an /ah/. For instance, the word ‘hide’ becomes ‘hahd’ and ‘rice’ becomes ‘rahs’. 

To hear some of these southern accents in action, check out actor and comedian Fred Armisen in this bit on The Tonight Show:

So my trip to Kyoto last weekend was great: I enjoyed a long walk through shrines and parks in the rain and I went to see one of my favorite artists live and we ended up going to Ginkakuji together the next day. Pretty cool.

The one downside of the trip was my capsule hotel experience. I won’t say the name of this capsule hotel because I’ve had good stays before, but this time I woke up sweaty around 6 am and couldn’t get back to sleep. The air was suffocating and I couldn’t find a fan or air conditioning button so I forced myself out of the tube to get fresh air and a shower just to cool down. I ended up checking out after that because I would have rather been sleep deprived than climbing into that furnace again.

I’m not trying to dissuade people from staying in a capsule hotel. On the contrary, I usually recommend them because of how cheap and conveniently located they are. I will warn you though to find a way to ventilate your capsule before falling asleep!

Joe

If your family is like mine, you didn’t grow up owning fun pets. Sure, we had cats, fish, and hamsters, but not any pets that you could actually do anything with. Much like cats, fish, and hamsters, neopets are also quite boring. 

If you are unfamiliar with Neopets.com, I’m not surprised. Developed in the late 90’s, Neopets quickly gained popularity in a time when flash animation was incredibly popular. Visiting Neopets.com today is like entering a portal into early 2000’s internet. It was a simpler time; eBaum’s World is where we got all our viral videos and MySpace was still relevant. Neopets gave kids with social anxiety a nice quiet place to play games, own and decorate a virtual home, and, strangely, buy and sell stocks in the Neopian stock market.

Most importantly, you could create your own neopet, strange creatures that didn’t quite do anything. You can customize your pet by painting it or buying it clothes…and that’s it. They’re fun to look at, I guess? The strange thing is; despite Neopets.com’s frozen-in-time setting, it still has a thriving community of active players, myself included. I think it’s precisely the nostalgia for a simpler time that keeps people coming back for more, and, if it’s not broken, why fix it?