irishosaru comments

Sounds to me like the writer is doing something Japanese people sometimes do: take the behaviour of a very small sample and assume it is representative of everybody.

That's what my some of friends do, so everybody must do it.

I went to the 29th best university in Ireland.

"What would you describe as a weakness in your character?" "Well, occasionally, I have some trouble differentiating between fantasy and reality."

"Ahhh....ok, well, what would you describe as a good point about you?" "I'm Batman."

my pace.

Golovkin knocked him out in the 3rd round, unfortunately for Ishida.

2 Panamanian judges, 1 English.

@smithinjapan,

the fight is in Monaco, not Japan. The Judges won't be all Japanese, as it's a world title fight.

If the squat is healthier, couldn't the position be achieved by simply leaning forward on a 'western' toilet?

In the pictures, it's $13-$14 a pack.

Are those American prices?

I've eaten it, it was nice, nothing special.

I wonder just how much horsemeat people in Nagano actually eat, though? Enough to make a significant contribution to longevity? I'd say other factors contribute far more, starting with their higher levels of vegetable consumption, and the air in Nagano is beautiful and clean too.

@Xeno23

Who would possibly think this is a good idea? What nimrod at the AFC scheduled this venue for this game?

Teams were drawn at random (within their seeding groups) to decide the make of each group in the group stages. After that, scheduling is simple - each team in a group plays the other 3 teams both home and away.

Jiangsu Sainty are the home team, so they play at home. Their home city is Nanjing. There will be a corresponding fixture played at Vegalta Sendai's home city of Sendai on May 1st.

Isn't the line that 'we will emerge stronger from this disaster' something a politician say about a week or two after the disaster?

Not 2 bloody years later, when sweet F all has been done!

The last paragraph:

Popular anger and will is beginning to demand that the resignation to vast inequality ends, and something less gross takes its place.

Really? I don't see this at all.

His conclusion: “The body rots, the soul lives.” A believing Christian will say, “Of course.” A non-believer will say it’s the usual religious claptrap. But Yasaku is speaking as a scientist. He may or may not convince, but his views cannot be written off lightly.

Not everything a scientist is based on science. This clearly isn't, so he isn't really speaking as a scientist. The fact that he's a doctor adds unjustified weight to his claims, when really he has no more reason to be believed than the gardener, or dog-groomer, for example.

This horsemeat story could run and run. Horse meat is even being found in ready-to-eat spaghetti bologneighs. The good news is that even people who got sick from them are now in a stable condition. The big scandal may soon be if traces of zebra meat are found in Tesco barcodes.

Although TV violence was not the only cause of aggressive behavior, its effect was relatively independent and explained a larger proportion of variance than any other single factor studied, e.g., IQ, social status, ethnicity, and parental disharmony.

Does television violence cause aggression? Eron, Leonard D.; Huesmann, L. Rowell; Lefkowitz, Monroe M.; Walder, Leopold O. American Psychologist, Vol 27(4), Apr 1972, 253-263.

The question reads 'contribute to violence', not 'cause violence'. Nobody is arguing that violence in the small or big screen is the sole cause of violence, so all the talk of Jack the Ripper and the Middle East is misguided. Everybody accepts that there is violence which is unrelated to movies, TV programs, and video games.

The question is whether or not a person's tendancy towards violence occurs as a result, to any extent, of the violence they are exposed to on screen.

"There are some key impacts of violent media on children that are very well demonstrated in research," Dr Warburton said. Dr Warburton said tests showed children who played violent video games had a heightened likelihood of aggression for up to 15 minutes after switching off the console. "Over the long term it's just like eating fatty food - one hamburger won't kill you but there is a cumulative effect." "They include increases in the likelihood of aggressive behaviour, increases in desensitisation to violence and an increase in the overall view that the world is more scary and hostile than it really is."

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/sydney-news/watching-violence-makes-for-angry-kids-study-shows/story-e6freuzi-1226401683643

I got married like this, except in Kamakura, I remember that a crowd gathered around us during the ceremony (one of a number at the sme shrine that day), and pareted as we walked off, with a round of applause. An extra bonus on an already special day.

I know that semantic development has to be taken into account, but I still hate expressions which qualify the word 'unique' like 'very unique' or 'really 'unique'.

Unique means (or used to, at least) completely individual and comparison, so it should not be qualified in any way.

"Going forward" seems to have replaced "in the future" even though it means nothing different.

"Think outside the box" - horribly overused.

"folks" is not, in my opinion, a term a president should be using.

In spelling, using 'of' instead of 'have', in sentences like, "I would of told him to go away".

Probably plenty more.

Who was appointed justice minister? I'm waiting for somebody to answer with 'Hatoyama Kunio', just to complete the nightmare.

It depends what, if anything, related to Ireland is happening in the news, or in the environment in which I now live. So when I see drunken Irish in Tokyo living up to the stereotype, or the needless death of a pregnant Indian happens in an Irish hospital, I feel a sense of embarrassment or even shame, that I am in some way connected culturally to it.

On the other hand, when Ireland is in the news for positive reasons, I feel pride for the same reasons.

Neither feeling is all that strong though, and Ireland is rarely in the news for any reason.

@daveyb

I'm not American or military, but occasionally drink in Yokosuka, which has lots of US military and bars to cater for them.

I've been asked many many times over the last few years, by both US military police/military patrol (whatever they are called) and by bar staff if I am military, because of some drinking/curfew restrictions.

When I tell them I'm not military, I'm politely left alone to get even more wasted.

Merkin Muffley.

@ shiofuki

Anyway, the question is whether it it right before God.

Despite all the tripe you've posted so far, this nearly made me cough out my Korean tea.

"The question" - whose question is it? One thing I didn't consider when pondering my response to the article was whether it is what god wants.

You want to live your life by asking yourself if the choices you make are what your god would want you to do. Don't be so insulting as to insist that others do likewise - the laws of many enlightened democracies try to avoid asking questions of any gods at all (see the working conditions of public school teachers in my own country of Ireland as a sickening exception to this rule).

To add to my previous post, it seems that the judge ruled based on the fact that the man is physically incapable of reproduction.

However, surely some (the vast majority) of men routinely recognised as the legal father of children conceived from donated sperm are incapable of reproduction.

Jesus the stupidity is strong on this one, both by the judge of the case in questions, and various posters on here.

This is a question of discrimination, nothing else. If Japan recognises the rights of transexuals to be considered as their 'new' gender (in this case, a woman who is now a man), does Japanese law mean that they must be treated equally in all cases? I don't know the answer to that question.

If so, and if there is a precendent that husbands of wives who have children by way of AI are 'routinely' recognised as the legal fathers, then the argument should be pretty clear to make.

It seems to me (is it my own ignorance?) that too often in Japan judges just make a ruling on whatever their own personal opinions are, regardless of the actual laws or precedents in place.

The toilet shall have its revenge.

Softbank could get their name on there, build some kind of amusement park, a megastore...Softbank city.

It has a nice ring to it.

I've always been somewhat sceptical of the argument that if you replace one word with another in a proposition, the central tenet remains the same (but is exposed for what it truly is).

I'm not sure that it is fair to say that because a voter casting their vote for a candidate only because the candidate was white would be considered racist, this means that a black voter casting their vote for candidate simply because they are black must be considered racist too.

There exists a history of white subjugation of blacks in the USA (and in most places around the world) which simply doesn't exist on anywhere near the same scale the other way round. A person voting for a white candidate because they are white is always going to be placed in the context of that historical injustice, whereas there is no similar context the other way round.

@ overchan -

my father had a VW Golf that had 278,000 miles (miles, not km) on it when it finally died. He used to show the odometer to people with pride.

He replaced it with a newer VW Golf that got to about 170,000 when he crashed it.

Regular servicing and careful driving was all it needed.