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Uncategorized

Election 2012 at SJHS

The 2012 election is over and done, but there are some extra results I should add to the public record.  Saroma’s 9th grade class mock-voted a week before the election, after watching several commercials from both candidates and watching excerpts from their convention speeches and the debates (they greatly enjoyed the moment in the second debate in which the two candidates confront each other with some tension in their voices).

And here are the results:

✔ Obama 45 Romney 3 Undecided 1
91.8% 6.1% 2%

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Uncategorized

English, Made in Japan

This post has been slowly fermenting in my drafts folder, waiting futilely for me to add enough to it to make it publish-worthy.  But I think I will simply publish it and make it a work in progress.  If you have any interesting bits of wasei eigo (Made-in-Japan English) please leave a comment and I’ll add it to the post. Dumb puns and other wordplays are equally accepted.  I’m not really interested in attested (dictionary) words here but more in the creative usage that people casually bring to life in their daily lives.

Vice Principal – “Half Middle President

“Ok, kids, this fruit starts with ‘water’ and the second half is the name of a fruit we’ve already learned today.” – Waterpeach!

What’s the opposite of hungry? – “uphungry!

LamentableRamen, taberu? (ラーメン食べる?)

Categories
Hokkaido

Who Owns Hokkai.do?

Sometimes when I’m bored, I’ll plug interesting word combinations into register.com and see what domain names are available. A while back I was intrigued by the two character top-level domains (TLDs) available from other countries such as .ly, .gl and .it (i.e. bit.ly, goo.gl, redd.it). I like the simplicity of a short, clean domain name and these do that.  So I tried to create domains that would fit with the preexisting TLD.

And of course I thought “wow, wouldn’t hokkai.do be great?” So I searched it. It turns out that .do is the TLD of the Dominican Republic, and that hokkai.do is taken.  But I was disappointed when I visited it.  There is nothing other than some text that says “Welcome to Hokkaido! Soon, my pretties…”  It’s been like that for more than six months since I checked it.

.DO domains aren’t cheap – one like this costs $125 for a two-year registration.  Someone’s paying $60 per year to sit on the hokkai.do domain name, linking to nothing and showing nothing. It seems a waste of a beautiful and sexy domain that if the Hokkaido Government decided to make use of, would give them some major street cred with internet-savvy peeps.

Who owns you, hokkai.do?

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