Africanist comments

She also famously declared that she had never met a man who liked women wearing them.

Obviously didn't know a lot of heterosexual men. Must be too much work in the fashion industry.

This is not news to anyone who knows jack about Islam. How about "New study finds Christians differ in their beliefs and practices" YAWN! The only interesting line to me was that American Muslims are more likely to think that there are different interpretations. It's funny to see the Muslim immigrants arrive and come face to face with Muslims of different beliefs and practices. Slowly they are working out an American Islam that will someday work great changes in the world (to quote Crevecoeur from memory).

Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, Orlando Bloom as Legolas, Christopher Lee as Saruman, Elijah Wood as Frodo

WTF?

Those characters weren't even in The Hobbit!

Baseball is an expensive game that can catch on as a country is developing rapidly, as it did in the US and Japan. I'd advise MLB not to try to sell the game unilaterally, lest it be seen as American cultural imperialism. Japan, emphasizing the age of the game in Japan (i.e. back to Meiji) and Cuba (hardly victims of American cultural imperialism) should be equally involved in selling the game in China, with perhaps a nod to the complicated nature of the sport and the wealth of statistics it generates.

Whoever wrote this doesn't get it. The head is carbonation OUT of the beer. I want the carbonation in the beer to stimulate the taste buds. A big head = flat beer. So

When you push the lever the cup creates a head on the beer. Not a bad idea in itself

is just wrong. The author himself doesn't know beer drinking. What editor approved this?

GRATEFUL DEAD RULE!

I don't miss most from my own country. I miss good Mexican food, I miss Ghanaian food, I miss several European cuisines that are totally mangled in Japan. But there's not so much I miss from my own country.

Are you sure it's just them? I'm neither Japanese nor a woman but I've done it too.

Japanese cuisine is famous for its visual aspects. Why not photograph it and post it?

I have known many Africans who have raise bi and even trilingual children, and I used what I learned from them. There are two basic ways to do it. One is to have each parent always use one particular language. Be sure that both parents talk to the kids regularly. In many families the father doesn't. It's not called "mother tongue" for nothing. The other way is to use each language in different contexts. The most common is using one outside the home, and one inside. Either way the children learn to use each language appropriately in its context, i.e. inside or outside, or with each parent.

Reports are calling this group a "Nigerian Taliban" but their doctrines would seem to be more closely related to the 'Yan Tatsine who also condemned western education as forbidden in Islam. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Marwa_Maitatsine

"Vowel heavy" just means plenty of open syllables (i.e. every syllable ends with a vowel). This is the case in African languages, too, but Japanese and the author of this book don't really consider Africans to be part of the human race. The real reason it concentrates on Polynesians goes back to colonialism, and Japanese attempts to assimilate those people into its empire. I'm surprised this nonsense is still floating around.

"Tokyo Joe" is not a classic Bogart film, but it is one of the few Occupation era films to actually show the American Occupation of Japan. As such it deserves special mention in any look at foreign films shot in Tokyo. Japanese films weren't allowed to show the Occupation.

"We were playing pinochle. It's a rough game." - Stalag 17

If the US is headed for Socialism then Socialism is inevitable. The United States is the only country in the world that doesn't have a significant Socialist, Communist or Labor Party. If Democrats are really being forced into Socialism by circumstances, against their will, then Socialism is inevitable, and the Republicans better get used to it. In the meantime, maybe they should find out what happened to the old Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs and why it failed to attract any support after the early 1920s. Why only a miniscule number of Americans support Socialism is a mystery. Why some 10% of Americans (half the shrinking Republican Party) think the Democrats are Socialists is just beyond my imagination. They're going insane.

Don't pay any attention to anything "revealed" during the last three weeks of the campaign. The only reason they bring it up now is because there's no time to refute it. AAMOF, this one was really brought up six months ago, but the McCain campaign is trying to make hay out of it now, when there's no time to react.

All languages are equally difficult, but they have different hard parts and easy parts. The hard parts of Japanese are kanji and keigo. The easy part is the pronunciation. That means Japanese is relatively easy of Chinese speakers and relatively difficult for English speakers. Japanese is also easy for speakers of Persian and should be easy for speakers of Kanuri also, since Kanuri, Persian and Japanese are all SOV particle inflected languages.

Aaron the Moor in "Titus"? Too flat. So 2 dimensional. What's his motivation?

Iago in "Othello"? much more believable. He has motivation aplenty, being so worked up about being not just under a black, but under a foreigner who is under a black. And the way he stabs Roderigo? Should have been in the back.

Richard III in "Richard III"! Ian McKellan is awesome and totally over the top. He can make an almost unbelievable villain believable. He's so totally evil that even his mother is cursing him as he heads to the climax.

NorikoT:

As general Eisenhower said after the war. I hate Germans. Was not the whole point of the wars and post war dramas simply to destroy the proud German race?

Say what? Don't you realize that Eisenhower is a German name? He said he was ashamed to be German, not that he hated Germans. Do you really think he was out to destroy his own race? Or are you so racist you can't comprehend that the war was against a hideous ideology of ultranationalism?

"I got angry because I couldn’t make him understand me.”

Sounds to me like the old man was seriously senile. He should have had professional care, not some teenager without any training in caregiving.