Guilty Pleasures....

First of all:  Merry Christmas! 

I started this blog post about ten days ago.  Things got a bit busy and so it goes that I'm finishing typing this up in Canada...after I had started working on this in Japan.

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Sometime during the past year a friend sent out an e-mail to all those he usually spams suggesting people send in the titles of songs which they'd call guilty pleasures.  Now my friend's tastes in music can be summed up along the lines of eclectic and widely varied.  He does have an ear for music and he can play an instrument competently.  So what he listens to has to meet a reasonably high personal standard.  He sent out one e-mail afterwards with a link to his guilty pleasure.  I took one look and, as I smiled to myself, thought "Oh...that was a bit predictable".  In short, it was a piece by a semi-obscure musician who could be summed up in one word: brilliant.  My follow-up thought was "Where's the fun in that?".

The fun in the situation from my friend's perspective probably lay in an expected reaction of "Oh, you still listen to him?".  Over indulging can certainly equate to guilty pleasure.  But my initial reaction had more to do with my personal feeling that a guilty pleasure should also arouse a sense of public embarrassment for the one holding it.  For me, that's the element of fun in having a guilty pleasure.


I was going to ramble on further but I'm going to cut this short by mentioning that my latest (yes, there are plenty of others) musical guilty pleasures come from the field of Kpop girl idol groups.  Not the statuesque and stunningly pretty variety though.  No.  I've gotten hooked on a couple of units (lets face it: no matter what the country, idol pop stars are more product than just talent) who I'd label as "quirky" or "odd".  The "odd" label applies to a quality which I've noticed: they remind me of mid-80s to mid-90s Japanese idols...which of course serves as a signpost in the direction of my past musical guilty pleasures.... 

No.... I Haven't Vanished...

It's been a while....  November seemed like a particularly busy month.  The first 10 days were dominated by work and my preparations to give a speech, in Japanese, on my experiences in Japan regarding the topic of human rights.  The next week after that was spent fighting a cold which I had picked up from a co-worker.  The last part of the month was highlighted by a life event which got me re-acquainted with Japanese emergency wards.  The highlight at the end of the month was a rock concert I attended in Saitama city.  Squeezed in between all that was the excitement of the Montedio Yamagata's push to make it into the J1 promotion playoff (they finished in 6th place and in December they upset the 3rd and 4th place teams in the playoff to win promotion to J1).  "Monte" is an association football, re: soccer, club which more or less is the only professional sports team of note in Yamagata prefecture.  I attended their last home match of the season.  I got to the stadium a little later than intended and in the hurry to get into the stadium after parking my car I forgot to turn off my headlights.  So I had to deal with a dead car battery after the match.  Luckily the nearest gas station/service station wasn't too far away from the parking lot and so I was able to obtain a jump start and make my way home.  Any ways, I'll go into details of the other things later.


Odd thought of the day:  I was looking at a map of south east Asia hanging on a wall in a classroom.  I took a closer look at Indonesia to see if I could spot where Krakatoa's location was.  I had been reading about the eruption of that volcano a few weeks ago.  I sussed out the location and for some odd reason I recalled reading there had been an attempt to get a particular group of people in Indonesia to use Hangul, the Korean alphabet, to write their language.  That attempt failed.  I had read about that because I've recently taken some interest in Korean pop music.  One challenge which quickly arose from that interest was the question of deciphering Hangul.  So I pulled up a web page and read about that alphabet, its history and the attempt to spread its use outside Korea.  Subsequently I printed off a chart meant to help people learn to read Hangul.  Reflecting on the Indonesians and the chart, I thought to myself "Well, if there were Indonesians willing to try using Hangul then what would it be like trying to write Japanese in Hangul?".  I contemplated that for a short moment.  Upon which I thought to myself, "Now there's something that would really annoy a lot of people...".