Interim Report: Paul In Memoriam

It is with great sadness that I convey the news that Paul the Oracle Octopus of World Cup fame has passed away. He "passed away peacefully" at his home in Germany on the 26th of October.
He will be sadly missed.

North Korea Scoop!

Pterosaurish, living on the edge in the world of international intrigue and conspiracy, has received through clandestine sources the transcript of the meeting in which North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's son was elevated to "Young General", and made successor to Kim Jong Il in the seat of power. Here it is unedited in its entirety.
Jang Song taek (#2 man)
Hyon Chol-hae (top general)
Kim Kyong-hui (Kim Jong Il's sister)
Ri Yong-ho (top general)
Paek Sang-ho (3-Star general)
Kim Jong-Un (Kim Jong Il's son)

Kim Jong Il (KJI): OK... I have brought all of you here today to confirm what we discussed in the last meeting that my son here – Kim Jong-Un – will succeed me in power after I die.
General Hyon: How will we do this? Nobody knows anything about him.
KJI: First we will promote him to 4-Star General and have someone write a song about him.
Jang (#2 man): He has no military experience at all. I wonder what the army will think of this.
Gen. Paek (3-Star Gen): I can tell you that *I don't like the idea of him being promoted ahead of me! Look at all these medals on my uniform! He doesn't even have ONE medal! I should be promoted to 4-Star General and he to 3-Star General.
Gen. Hyon: Yes, I can understand your frustration, but this is only to make a name for the "Young General" so that he can succeed Dear Leader.
KJI: Yes, he would not have actual operational power in the army, Gen. Paek. He would simply be able to sit on the podium with you. Also, we need to give him some medals for his uniform too.
Kim Jong-Un (the son): I want lots of medals! I want a nice uniform too, one that makes me look slimmer. Do they have any uniforms with vertical stripes on the pants and sleeves? Vertical stripes have a slimming effect. And I want my medals to be big and shiny too. Maybe 8 rows of them? Also if the medals could be long and thin, they would...
KJI: Would you shut up! Enough of that stuff already!
Gen. Paek: If he gets more medals than I have, I will not accept his promotion at all!
KJI: Son? Take your thumb out of your mouth and stop that pouting. You cannot be a Young General and do that sort of thing.
Kim Kyong-hui (KJI's sister): All I can think of is how I used to grab Jong-un's chubby little cheeks when he was a boy. My how he has grown up... but I *still want to grab those chubby cheeks!
Jong-un: My cheeks are NOT chubby! Daddy! Tell her to stop saying my cheeks are chubby! I am NOT fat.
KJI: Sis! Will you lay off the boy!
And, Jong-un! I won't tell you again, you need to stop sucking your thumb like that!
Jong-un: But she said I was fat!
Gen. Hyon: This is ridiculous! We cannot make this spoiled, fat blob a 4-Star General in our Army!
Jong-un: I am NOT a fat blob! Stop calling me fat!
KJI: OK! OK! Can we at least decide on one thing? Let's call him "Young General"! We can work out the rank later. I will have him sit on the podium at the up-coming mass games and parade.
Gen. Paek: If he wears a uniform with medals, *I for one am NOT coming!
KJI: Jong-un! Sticking out your tongue at Gen. Paek is not helping at all! (audible sigh) OK... no uniform. Gen. Ri? You will sit between us on the podium.
Jong-un: I want some medals.
KJI: No medals this time, Jong-un. Is all this OK with you, Jang?
Jang: Yes. I think it will be fine to start out this way. We don't want to overdo it at first just in case the "Young General" doesn't work out.
KJI: What do you mean by that? Jong-un! How many times do I have to tell you about the thumb sucking!
Jang: Well, Dear Leader, after you are gone, the Young General might feel that he would rather do other things... you know... like go to Disneyland like his older brother tried to do.
KJI: Enough of that talk! Jong-un WILL succeed me! We will meet again after the mass games and parade to discuss this further. And don't mention Oldest Son to me again!
Jong-un: Next time I want a uniform with vertical stripes and lots of medals!
(audible crying... assumed to be Kim Jong Il.)

The Pterosaurish Diet: weigh yourself slim

I have written about dieting fads here and also about the growing (har!) obesity problem in the United States, but it's not enough to simply stand on the sidelines and carp; I need to get out there and DO something about it.
After careful and extensive research in which I examined a wide range of diets and healthy lifestyle scenarios, I think I have come up with the best way to lose weight. Our country (as you know from reading last week's post) needs to lose four Swedens, hopefully before next summer when we will all have to wear bikinis and expose ourselves in public.
A lot of health and physical fitness professionals charge big bucks to help you lose weight, but in the spirit of voluntarism, I am offering my advice for free. Of course, if you WANT to send a little money, it will be gratefully accepted.
The thing about dieting is simple, and – yes – it does involve some math. You take the number of calories that are coming into your body and subtract the number of calories that you are burning by your daily activities. What is left is called a "remainder" or, in this case, blubber. It is usually left somewhere where you don't want to see it like on your stomach or butt where it "remains".
"So what do we do to reduce our remainders," you ask?
A very good and timely question!
The critical point of course is to actually KNOW how many calories are coming in. Handy lists like this one make the task of calorie counting a breeze! All you need to do is weigh everything you eat before you eat it and look up each item on the internet to see how many calories it has! This activity also burns a few calories, so you have a double benefit.
That bag of chips? Three thousand calories! (Plus a lot of sodium which can cause high blood pressure.) That half-gallon of ice cream? Six thousand calories. And so on. Of course, a lot of people eat out, and weighing the food at the all-you-can-eat place is inconvenient. You need to guess. That plate full of mashed potatoes with six slices of roast beef? Heft it in your hand. You can get pretty close with a guess like this: about thirteen thousand calories. The large bowl full of chocolate cake with a mountain of ice cream on top? Again, you will need to weigh it in your hand and make an educated guess. Twenty thousand calories, sounds about right to me. Don't worry if you are off by a few calories. Also don't forget that a lot of things don't have any calories at all: the plate, for example.
Then, once you know the number of calories coming in, you estimate the amount of calories going out. This is much harder, since you cannot weigh them before they go out. You can, however, weigh yourself and get a good idea of how many calories are being "burned". Weigh yourself before you do something that you think will burn calories. Then weigh yourself again after you finish. It's that simple!
Before walking to the car: 357 lbs (162 kg)
After walking to the car: 357 lbs (162 kg)
Before watching TV and having some snacks: 357 lbs (162 kg)
After watching TV and having some snacks: 367 lbs (167 kg)
Before going into the all-you-can-eat restaurant: 367 lbs (167 kg)
After coming out from the all-you-can-eat restaurant: 400 lbs (182 kg)
And so on. This simple and easy-to-use technique will soon put you in a "think about my calories" mode and will make dieting easy.
Following this simple weighing routine will make it possible for you lose your remainder effortlessly. The fat will simply melt away!

American Juche, or Math for the Layman

Regrettably, math has never been my strong suit. I was able to keep awake in math classes only by having my head hit the desk every few minutes as I nodded off. Needless to say, what I gained from all those years of cat napping was not a comprehensive knowledge of pluses and minuses.
Nonetheless, now an adult, I feel that I need to come to terms with this glaring weakness and do some math. Last week, I briefly mentioned North Korea's philosophy, juche – based on the "people's masses" – and how America has more "juche" (주체 in Hangul, ubberblay in Pig Latin) than any other country on the planet. The challenge I have chosen for today is to determine exactly how much "juche" the US has!
No sleeping in the back of the classroom... I am watching you!
First of all, I needed to do some research. One thing I found is that the American public has been getting more and more juche packed onto their bodies at an accelerating rate. This cool graphic demonstrates where and how this has been happening. (An explanation of this trend can be found here.) As an aside, it is interesting to note that the states which lead the way in the juche index are the so-called "red states". Maybe there is some connection between Republicans and juche?
But I digress again (this is a teaching tactic we professionals use to keep our charges awake while they are listening to lectures that would otherwise be near-death experiences).
I also discovered that the
average American is 17 lbs, or roughly 8 kg overweight. The current US population is 307,006,550 and growing (har!). Let's round that off to 300 million. Rounding off is a good technique when dealing with large numbers, since when you multiply, you won't have to "carry" so many numbers.
I never could get the "carrying" part of math... you know... "carry the two" and so on? Where was I supposed to carry it to? And what if it was a 3 or a 6? Should I carry them to the same place as the twos? That never seemed right to me. I mean, when we board a plane, we "carry on" smaller bags (the ones and twos) but the bigger bags (eights and nines) need to be checked. Of course, there is a "gray area" where some passengers (usually with a lot of juche) think their sixes and sevens should be "carried", but actually they should be "checked". This results in a lot of violent stuffing maneuvers at the overhead storage compartments that end up with flight attendants jumping off the plane via the emergency slide. And speaking of "those passengers", you know how they have a little cage at the check-in counter with a sign reading, "Does your carry-on fit in here?" They should have a seat there too with a sign saying, "Does your juche fit in here?"
Anyway...
So, rounding off the American population to 300 million and multiplying that by the average amount of juche (17 lbs or 8 kg for those of you who have not been paying close attention), we come to 5.28 billion pounds or 2.4 billion kilograms. Now THAT is a substantial amount of juche! Eat your heart out North Korea!
Still, figures like that leave us wondering things like, "What does that figure mean exactly?" It is hard for the human mind to grasp numbers with more than one or two zeros after them, partly because of the "carrying" I alluded to earlier; these are the numbers that should be "checked".
So let's put this number into "layman's terms". The height of an average Swedish man is 5'10" (178 cm) tall and of a Swedish woman 5'5" (165 cm). For these heights, the ideal weight should be 141~174 lbs (64~79 kg) for a man and 112~143 lbs (51~65 kg) for a woman. For the sake of this math exercise, let's assume that Swedes are generally not packing too much juche and are close to the ideal average in weight. Most of the Swedes I have met seem to fall into that category.
OK... the research phase is finished and now we need to do some math. If we take the top and bottom weights (har!) of an ideal Swedish man and add them together, we get what is called a "total" or a "sum". We then divide this sum by two to get an "average" (sometimes called a "mean" or, in the case of Americans, a "hippopotamus"). This is 158 lbs or 72 kgs for the ideal Swedish man. If we do the same for the women, we come up with 128 lbs or 58 kgs. Assuming that there are roughly equal numbers of men and women in Sweden, we can add the men's weight and the women's weight together and come up with another average: 143 lbs or 65 kgs.
Are you keeping up with this math here? Good!
So we can say that the average Swede weighs somewhere around 143 lbs or 65 kgs.
"What does the average weight of Swedes have to do with American juche," you ask? A very good question!
Since the US is 5.28 billion pounds or 2.4 billion kilograms overweight, we can find out (by dividing) how many Swedes that would amount to! Is that cool or what?!!
Yes, very cool! And you thought that you would NEVER need to use dividing in real life!
If we divide those numbers by the average weight of a Swede, we come up with the equivalent of around 37 million Swedes! Sweden's population, however, is only 9,059,651. So in easy-to-understand layman's terms, the US is packing the equivalent of four Swedens: two on its back butt and two on its front butt.
There! That wasn't so bad, was it?

Why Aren't Our Leaders "Dear"?

Here in the US, we have elections every four years for the Presidency. It's boringly routine. We have been doing this since 1789, 221 years. Talk about soporific history! And then, when the elections are over, all we have is a President... Mr. President...zzzzz.
What we need to liven things up around here are some cool names for our leader like other countries give to theirs.
Take North Korea.
Now there is a country that really knows how to come up with names for leaders! Their first leader, Kim Il Sung (김일성 in Hangul, 金日成 in Chinese characters, and Imkay Ilay Ungsay in Pig Latin) formally held a lot of the top posts of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, but was called "Great Leader". Great Leader works when you are actually "leading", but what happens when you press on to your reward? Good ol' North Korea knows: after his death, he was called "Eternal President".
Imagine how much more appealing someone like President Millard Fillmore (Personal Slogan: Loading...) would be if we could call him "Excellent Leader" or "Bold Commander". The whole election process itself would benefit from this naming approach as it would generate more interest amongst the clearly comatose electorate in this country. You could even have polls to come up with appropriate titles for the candidates before they are elected.
Kim Il Sung's son, Kim Jong Il (김정일, 金正日, and Imkay Ongjay Ilay) is called "Dear Leader" these days, not as robustly masculine as "Great" or "Eternal", but still better than mere "President". After he moves on to the Communist hereafter, no doubt he will be called "Eternal Dear" or some other equally cool appellation.
What's really cool about North Korea (Mission Statement: GO FUCK YOURSELF!), is how they manage to come up with these names. As I am sure all of you know by now, Kim Jong Il is very ill (HAR!) and is trying to pass on the reins of government to his young son, Kim Jong-un (김정은, 金正銀, 金正雲 or 金正恩 [it seems unclear] and Imkay Ongjay unay [which is clear enough for me]). In order to do this, they have to give the young lad an impressive sounding title. What have they come up with? "Young General"! And to make it even better, his father has promoted the Young General (who has absolutely no military experience) to four-star general in the DPRK army. (Pterosaurish can hear the hard-bitten three-star generals' eyes rolling all the way over here in Seattle.)
Speaking of North Korea, did you know that their society is built on the concept of "juche"(oojay ehchay)?
"What is that?!" I hear you ask.
Allow me to answer that important question.
According to the official website of the DPRK, "The Great Leader (Imkay Ilay Ungsay) said: 'The Juche Idea means, in few words, that the owner of the revolution and construction are the people's masses'.
Well let me tell you... we over here in the good ol' U. S. of A. can out juche any country on the planet. Our people's masses would easily win out over the citizens of a pathetic, little country like North Korea. Why just the other day I saw a person waddling down the street whose juche index was off the charts.
But I digress.
The main point of this article was about the cool names that North Korea comes up with for its leaders and how we could learn something from them. So, next Presidential election, how about "High Overseer Obama" for starters?

Teaching English the Better Way

As many of you know, I have spent my career in academia, teaching English to speakers of other languages. A noble profession, but one filled with frustration at times, given the slow progress and lack of achievement on the part of so many students.
Having time now to contemplate these deficiencies and investigate at length the issues of neuroscience and linguistic acquisition, as well as cross-disciplinary studies, I believe that I have come upon a new technique which might revitalize – if not revolutionize – how we teach foreign languages. The potential for spectacular results is enormous.
In the evangelical Christian movement, there is a sub-culture of believers who practice what is called glossolalia, speaking in tongues. In a state of religious fervor, these practitioners spontaneously begin discourse in a language that they have not formally learned. Some say it is the language of the angels while others claim it is an ancient holy language.
The key here, for those of us in the language-teaching field, is that the language they speak has not been formally studied; the speakers suddenly begin using it with native fluency on the spur of the moment! Imagine if you could replicate this process in your language classroom! No more worries about that discouraged student with his head down on the desk, or frets about whether your lesson plan will last 15 minutes or two! Your students will begin speaking fluently in a very short time, maybe as fast as one day!

Of course, I am sure all of you have some questions about this new technique. Let's look at some of your questions.

1. Traditional techniques that we have grown accustomed to might not be effective in teaching this new method (with the possible exception of Total Physical Response), so what can we as teachers do in the classroom to cover for this deficiency in methodology?

2. This is pretty obvious, but we don't want our students to suddenly become fluent in Angelic, so how do we get them to speak English?

3. If the students learn in one day what has typically taken at least 450 hours of intensive instruction to acquire, what will become of our jobs?

Let me address these very real concerns one-by-one.
1. How do we as teachers re-tool ourselves to meet the new challenge of an entirely different way of doing things? I would like to draw my readers' attention back to the 1960s and '70s when the audio-lingual method was in vogue. The key component of that method was repetition and substitution.
The teacher would cue the linguistic point (S-V-O), "Johnny has many girlfriends" and the students would repeat it, "Johnny has many girlfriends!" in unison. Then, branching off from the sentence but still using the same subject-verb-object pattern, the teacher would make a substitution, "... sex with all of them" and the students would instinctively know that this was an object and would substitute it in the object slot, "Johnny has sex with all of them!" Then still another substitution from the teacher, "... STDs in spades", and the students would dutifully respond, "Johnny has STDs in spades!"
You get the picture. Of course, most of the lessons were not as interesting as that one, and students would slip into boredom-induced comas in about 3 minutes, but the keys here are the "instinctive nature" by which they grasped that the substitution should be an object, and the way that teachers around the world made the transition from the pervasive audio-lingual approach to other more modern and no less effective techniques.
Let's face it, the people who are speaking in tongues right now are the same people who believe in creationism, so clearly a high IQ is not a requirement for learning with this technique (see earlier post). The teacher simply needs to create the proper atmosphere in the classroom: perhaps some rattles, incense and chanting might be helpful to raise the students' spiritual fervor to new heights. Perhaps Jazz Chants could be adapted to this new technique. The method is new, but I am confident that my colleagues in the English-teaching world will rise to this challenge as they did back in the '70s when people suddenly realized that the audio-lingual method was stupid.
2. Attractive though it is that our students might suddenly be able to speak ANY foreign tongue – even Angelic – we must not lose sight of our goal which is that they come away from our classrooms, speaking English. Research shows that the language the glossolalia practitioners speak comes from deep within them, so having some access to the students' inner selves is critical. It is my judgment (based on extensive research, not just sitting around making things up) that the ability to speak in tongues involves a transitional stage, that people do not actually break out into fluent Angelic or whatever, but rather start slowly and within a short time, achieve amazing fluency. It is during this transitional phase, that the students' natural tendencies to Angelic need to be supplanted with English forms. Subliminal projections in a powerpoint presentation, for example, or previous-night, dream intervention might be able to preempt the development of Angelic speech patterns and substitute English. Of course, failure among some of your students is inevitable; some will simply end up speaking Angelic. But considering that they spoke no foreign languages before, even this will be a sign of success.
3. Efficiencies in production always result in a loss of jobs and using this new, ground-breaking technique will certainly result in efficiencies. When you are cranking out fluent English-speakers in a day or two, it seems that it wouldn't be long before you ran out of students. I believe, however, that the use of this technique will not result in a continuing ability to use English fluently. There will be inevitable slipping back into Angelic or even loss of fervor to speak like this at all. This is where the teacher's role will become even more critical. Workshops in reinvigorating fervor, for example, or remediation of Angelic-creep into the students' English will be the focus of our work, providing a new and exciting challenge everyday.
As I see it, this is a win-win opportunity. Students come away with real language skills and teachers gain the opportunity to branch out into new and different challenges that will provide a break from the humdrum of today's lessons and methods.
If I am awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, I will definitely accept; I can use the money.

The Bugs of Summer

I really don't believe that Japan is buggier than other places on the planet. After all, I heard from a resident of Minnesota that the mosquito is their state bird. Nevertheless, there are a lot of pesky, buzzing things in the air in summer and keeping them at bay is a full-time occupation. The Kincho Company (Motto: Live with nature the better way; spray it) offers a delightful spread of options for dealing with mosquitoes. There are the mosquito incense coils to "kill them", a wearable vapor-emitting device to keep them away for "240 hours", a selection of bug repellent sprays, a wearable canister which can hold a burning mosquito coil, an electric heater for "vapor mats", and electric vapor-heaters for bottled liquid (good for 60 days!). All this for only mosquito protection.
There are two products which I would like to discuss today. The first is the blue electric zapper. Everyone has seen one, standing on a pole in someone's yard, emitting a small snapping sound when an insect – obviously overcome with religious fervor – "sees the light" a little too closely. My question has to do with the theory behind them. You see, they ATTRACT bugs. Isn't that what we DON'T want to happen?
Scenario
1. I hang a blue-light bug zapper in my yard.
2. It attracts bugs from miles around.
3. A lot of the bugs stop off for a snack before they go on their crusade into the light.
4. I do a lot of scratching.
Clearly this is not a good plan. We need to get someone else to buy these things and hang them as far from us as possible.

Next. Cockroaches. A lot of companies (including Kincho mentioned above) make little boxes that catch cockroaches. In the US they are called "Cockroach Hotel" -- "the roaches check in, but they don't check out". Clever.
In Japan they are called Gokiburi Hoi Hoi, which I loosely translate as "Cockroaches! C'mon C'mon!"
But... do they work? Let me relate a story about cockroaches.
When I was in college, being poor I lived in a basement apartment, a "refinished" living space in the hot- water-heater, central heating-unit space of the old house above me. It was cheap.
I shared that space with other creatures who also could not afford the rents of the better rooms above, rats and cockroaches in particular.
The roaches were always out in my kitchen, foraging for treats. When I saw them, I would smack them with Time Magazine or spray them with one of those chemical weapons that has the skull and crossbones on it. I also used the roach hotel traps and would occasionally find one or two stuck in the little box in the morning when I woke up – very satisfying!
Smacking them worked; it would usually do them in on the spot, but it made a mess of my magazines. The spray seemed less immediately successful. I remember seeing one come out from under my fridge and look up at me as if to say, "You still here?"
I sprayed it so much it looked like a tuft of whipped cream running around on the floor, but it simply shrugged off the spray and ran into the wall that divided my living area from the heating units for the apartments above.
Aha!
The roaches live in the wall! (I imagined a small tribe of a couple of dozen insects warming themselves cozily in there.)
I bought several cans of DEATH TO EVERY LIVING THING THAT ISN'T HUMAN spray and carved small holes with my Swiss Army Knife in the wall that separated my living space from the heater area. I then unleashed a whole can of the aerosol weapon into the holes in the wall and waited.
The waiting took only a few seconds.
A sea... a tsunami... a vast flow of cockroaches of all sizes and shapes poured out of the wall into my living room.
Naturally...
I freaked.
I got my trusty Zippo lighter, flicked it on and sprayed the Death Spray over the flame, creating a flame thrower to incinerate the roaches as they flowed in their thousands out of the wall. Males, females, babies... I confess... I killed them indiscriminately. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. I lost count. They overran my ability to kill them, so vast were the hordes.
I moved out.
But I learned a lesson. The lesson was that the cockroach hotels are just for show. The cockroaches send their sick and lame to get caught in them, so that we humans will feel ok about having thousands of roaches around.
"OK, Gramps! You have been spending too much time loafing around, and we are tired of your flatulence. You have been chosen by our Executive Committee to go get yourself stuck in that stupid roach hotel thing the humans have put out."
So grampa roach shuffles out and sacrifices himself for the horde, getting himself stuck in the trap which we then put out gleefully on burnable trash day. The swarm, however, continues its work for world domination in our walls unscathed. And in our hearts, we know they're right.