ロゼッタ石碑

148 lbs

If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.

After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he’d prefer six months of hard labour to reading six lines aloud.

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Fe0ffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

[ɪŋglɪʃ pronənsieʃən] by G. Nolst Trenité

1. P90X2

2. DLAB/DLPT

3. MLT Certification (ASCP)

4. Read more (Murakami, Larsson)

5. Write more (rozetta, sansfocus)

6. Build computer

7. Start brushing up on Korean & Japanese

8. Drink less; drink more tea and coconut water instead.

9. Fix tennis elbow

10. Get rid of acne

1. SONY NSX40GT1

2. P90X2

3. HTPC

Shuttle XPC SX58H7-PR
MSI N560GTX-M2D1GD5 GTX 560 (Fermi) 1GB
Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz
CORSAIR XMS3 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 SDRAM 
Intel 320 Series SSDSA2CW080G310 80GB SSD

4. Chauncey Billups Home/Away Swingman Jersey

5. 佐々木希2012年カレンダー

6. San Francisco Ork! Poster

7. ござマット

8. Bamboo Shoe Rack

9. Nike SFB

10. Nike Gyakusou Undercover Series

Mesh-Lined Hooded Jacket
Asymmetric Shorts
Running Shirt

11. Saucony Peregrine New Balance MT10 Minimus

12. Polartec Fleece Blanket

13. Nike+ Sportwatch GPS

If you’ve been a denizen of the San Francisco Bay Area (or maybe even perhaps the Greater New York area) for the past decade or so, you may have noticed a subtle rise in the demand of proletarian Asian cuisine which is slowly taking over their more traditional counterparts in terms of popularity and patronage. If you haven’t, here’s your Paul Revere moment of the day: THE RED COA-, I mean, THE PROLETARIAT ARE COMING, AND THEY’RE TAKING OVER THE ASIAN CULINARY SCENE AS WE KNOW IT!

Hold up, let’s roll back the dice for a second.

What exactly is proletarian Asian cuisine? Nothing good haas ever come out of anything being described as proletarian unless you closely align your political beliefs with those of Karl Marx‘s faithful, you say?

While there certainly isn’t a full-on divide between different social classes of culinary forms (or at least I hope there isn’t) I shouldn’t have to point out that there are noticeable discrepancies in the type of commodities oft found on the dinner tables of different… income brackets, hence the distinction of proletarian vs. non-proletarian; petit-bourgeois vs. bourgeois; ground chuck vs. filet mignon–the list goes on and on.

So when Asian cuisine more or less first arrived in America, most of the start-ups would try to exploit the exoticity (yes, I know it’s not a real word YET, live with it) of their strange foreign cuisine, by plating the most universally palatable dishes as their culinary forefront. And now, the million-dollar idea.

In any culture or subculture, the most universally palatable dishes are traditionally consumed by the non-proletarian, as their limit on physical resources to create palatable dishes is vastly uncapped compared to those of the proletarian. Given this idea, the non-proletarian tend to make their ingredients fit their style of cooking and not the other way around. In contrast, proletarian cuisine is distinct in the way that they model their culinary methods around the available ingredients, something that’s been practiced since the days when cro-magnons used to make neanderthals their bitches.

To further illustrate my million-dollar idea, I present a crude example of the culinary disparity once present in medieval England:

Barley, oat and rye among the poor, and wheat for the governing classes, were eaten as bread, porridge, gruel and pasta by all members of society. Fava beans and vegetables were important supplements to the cereal-based diet of the lower orders; Meat was more expensive and therefore more prestigious and in the form of game was common only on the tables of the nobility. (Woolgar, C.M., Food in medieval England: diet and nutrition, Oxford University Press, 2006)

If this hasn’t made it clear by now, I am simply using an overly-complicated, roundabout way of illustrating the validity of the age-old maxim/proverb “don’t touch what you can’t afford” as it applies to food.

Now that we’re a little more familiar to what exactly entails proletarian and non-proletarian cuisine, I will now present three different examples of (Asian) proletarian cuisine overtaking their non-proletarian masters, through the cases of the Japanese, the Chinese, and the Korean.

When most people of non-Japonic origin ponder upon the definition of “Japanese cuisine,” the first thought that  undoubtedly pops into mind is “sushi” or “sashimi.” While it is hard to factor out [raw] fish and seafood from the overall identity of Japanese food, fruits of the sea in their raw, pristine form are hardly considered staples in the everyday diet of the modern Japanese.  Whereas broiled and/or cooked fish is considered a part of a “traditional breakfast” in Japan (alongside a bowl of miso soup and rice,) sushi, as many would expect, is mostly only consumed on special occasions due to its price and relative scarcity. And this is where the idea of universal palatability factors in

[Example 1: rise and fall of sushi; consequent supplanting by ramen -- yakitori]

[define: traditional restaurant vs. izakaya]
[Supplanting idea: irony of using cheap ingredients for "luxurious food"; irony of using expensive ingredients for "cheap food"]
{nom nom pic 1}

[Example 2: rise and fall of "mainstream" Chinese cuisine; consequent supplanting by street/cha chaan teng food]
[exemptory qualifier: all, if not most, Chinese food being represented in America is more or less Cantonese in nature, or being cooked by Cantonese]
[Supplanting idea 1 from above also applies, also point out how cheap food costs tons more than expensive food now]
{nom nom pic 2}

[Counter Example 1: the rise and fall of "mainstream" Korean food, and its supplanting by the more bourgeois counterpart of Korean BBQ]
[Supporting idea 1: sometimes it's just a matter of what's more palatable]
[Supporting idea 2: In the case of Korean food, proletarian cuisine already somewhat represented its bourgeois counterpart]
{nom nom pic 3}

[Oh shit, curve ball! Point: fusions?]

[Conclusions: I am awesome, that is all. You are (not) what you eat; your eating level no longer reflects the social class you belong to, etc.]

昨日までの毎日がまるで長いようで一瞬なHOLIDAY
ON AND ON HEY MR. DJ 回すTURNTABLE BREAKBEATSにのせ
思えば歌う 過ごした月日 出会えば別れが近づく日々 クソ喰らえ
時代は過ぎ 時間だけは過ぎていくよ 迷わずに
あれからもう 約何年 思い出してみるなら儚ねー
初めて会った頃 大嫌いだった アイツが今じゃ だいの連れ
BACK IN THE DAY 朝の来ねえ夜までひたすらかけ抜けて行くぜ ALL DAY ALL NIGHT
次のページめくる 過ぎていく時を 追わずBAY BLUES

ON AND ON 出来るだけ 遠くまで 行けるとこまで 行くべ
出口やゴールなどねぇ 所詮はどんぐりの背比べ
ON AND ON 生まれて死んでくだけ 笑えるだけ笑え
そこにゃ理屈なんかいらねぇ 出会い晴れ 別れ雨

それでも回る地球さ まるでおもちゃ箱みてえ道草
泣いた 笑ったとかはいいさ 乗り越えた今だから二度もねえさ
思い出しても そこにゃもう居ねぇ 霞んで消えてくだけ思い出
死ぬまでつるんでいこうぜ MY MEN 俺の記憶の中 生きていく一人で
今だけ 今だけが特別な時 熱いもの込めた情熱的
綴っていく ペンの上 生き様いく NO PAIN NO GAIN
まわりくどい事は言わねぇ ただ目の前がまぶしいBABY
その気になりゃ今よりうだつ上がる その気んなりゃ 地球も一つになる

俺のRADIOから鳴る曲 移りゆく景色の中 鳴り響く
RADIOから鳴る曲 変わる季節の中 遠い記憶
俺のRADIOから鳴る曲 移りゆく景色の中 鳴り響く
RADIOから鳴る曲 変わる季節の中 遠い記憶

ON AND ON 出来るだけ 遠くまで 行けるとこまで 行くべ
出口やゴールなどねぇ 所詮はどんぐりの背比べ
ON AND ON 生まれて死んでくだけ 笑えるだけ笑え
そこにゃ理屈なんかいらねぇ 出会い晴れ 別れ雨

うろたえねー 前へ 答え そりゃ MY WAY もがいて ないで ひたすらな夢
絶えず運命 抱いたまま上 退屈いらねぇ TIME IS MONEY
この際はダイレクト まさに外伝 うだつ上がる HEY うわっつら内面
絶えず運命 描いたなら上 二つとないね いたずらなGAME

思い出したそう言えば 俺ガキんときゃ 生まれたまんまのにな
たかが何か こっ恥ずかしいだとか 素直にゃなれねー 俺の今
目にした現実の数だけ イカレていくよ 夢は捨てねぇ
でも俺は俺だけさ 常忘れねー 人は人 それはそれ
春四月 桜散り 夏 暑さにうかれ 秋収穫 冬こえて春 夏秋冬 また来る季節
去年とは違う まだやり足らねぇ事ばっか やらかしてるドデケーなんか
世界中 今この時を感じているかよ おはよう

ON AND ON 出来るだけ 遠くまで 行けるとこまで 行くべ
出口やゴールなどねぇ 所詮はどんぐりの背比べ
ON AND ON 生まれて死んでくだけ 笑えるだけ笑え
そこにゃ理屈なんかいらねぇ 出会い晴れ 別れ雨
うろたえねー 前へ 答え そりゃ MY WAY もがいて ないで ひたすらな夢
絶えず運命 抱いたまま上 退屈いらねぇ TIME IS MONEY
この際はダイレクト まさに外伝 うだつ上がる HEY うわっつら内面
絶えず運命 描いたなら上 二つとないね いたずらなGAME

Everyday leading upto yesterday seemed so long compared to this momentary holiday
On and on, hey Mr. DJ drop the breakbeat on the turntable.
I spent my days putting my thought to lyrics, in these times where “hellos” soon lead to “goodbye”
Fucking a man, time flies by; in fact it’s the only thing that’s truly consistent in this world.
The chumps that I used to hate when we first met are now some of my tightest homies,
back in the day when we’d go on and on until the end of the never-ending night all day and all night
I turn the page to the next chapter of my life, living with the bay blues without chasing after the escaping time.

On and on, go as far as you can, I’ll go until I can go no more
there’s no such thing as an “exit” or a final “goal”; life’s all the same to begin with
On and on, we live and then we die, laugh about it as much as you can
There’s no logic to it at all, after every sunny hello there’s always a cloudy goodbye

i dreamt i was drowning in a pool of water for some reason, and then the “camera” or the “scene” kinda zoomed out and it was revealed to me that i was drowning inside a giant douchebag.

1. drinking with antonio inoki at some pub (wth??)

2. running/jogging on west cliff peering at the coastline

Even the most devout of Japanophiles, when charged with the task of describing the first image of the samurai that comes to mind, elicit the striking image of a noble armor-clad warrior wielding the iconic katana in the heat of battle. Whereas the militaristic foundations and the purposes to which the samurai class was originally founded validate such portrayals of the samurai as accurate, history suggests that such romanticized depictions of the samurai only capture a small aspect of their complex identity.

A brief crash course in the history of the Japanese archipelago reveals that the rise of the warrior class and the warrior elites started in mid 12th century with the advent of the Kamakura Period of Japanese history. The warrior class of this time came into power under the time-tested axiom of “might makes right” and gradually wrested authority away from the imperial rule previously established during the Nara and Heian Periods of Japanese history. The emperor gradually lost all de facto authority by the advent of the Muromachi Period in the 14th century—a time of escalated violence and vicissitude perhaps most attributable to all the aforementioned romanticized portrayals of samurai—and the Japanese archipelago remained under the mercy of military might until its unification under the now famous “rice cake metaphor.”

An irony surrounding the identity of the samurai is that whereas media depictions and portrayals of the samurai would most rightly place them in the midst of all the raging military conflicts of the Kamakura and Muromachi Periods, their existence only became codified and officially recognized after those military conflicts would mostly come to a halt with Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s rise to power. Toyotomi Hideyoshi laid the foundations for a social caste system where the right to exercise violence would be limited to a hereditary group of warriors whose task was to samurau [侍ふ/候ふ], or to “serve and stay by the side of one’s master” . The irony would only be realized in its full extent after Toyotomi’s reign would be brought to an end and the Japanese archipelago would finally be unified and followed by two and a half centuries of Tokugawa rule, where a caste system based on military ascriptions would be expected to function without an outstanding war to fight.

The Tokugawa Period which followed soon after the formal codification and recognition of the samurai as a social class, was a time of unparalleled peace on the Japanese archipelago; so much to the point that historians often refer to it as the Pax Tokugawa in the fashion of the period of peace and prosperity in the Roman empire which bears a similar name. Much like the Heian Period on the Japanese archipelago where a prolonged period of peace gave rise to an overabundance of culture, (or what historian Gregory Smits refers to as “a rule of taste”) a similar phenomenon was observed during the Tokugawa Period, where the samurai elite and the daimyō to whom they were bound, were more concerned with the pursuit of culture than militaristic gains and campaigns.

Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa shōgun, for example, was known to be a “pragmatic Sinophile,” under the impression that Chinese (predominantly neo-Confucian) thought “[would serve] as a tool for the construction of good government” and that the collection of Chinese art, like the shōgun before him, were a way to “to [draw] connections to the legitimizing power of Chinese civilization” . Where most cloistered rulers before Ieyasu’s time—such as the ōgosho of the Ashikaga shogunate or the “retired emperors” of the Nara and Heian periods whom employed the insei system of rule—continued to insert themselves into the affairs of the state or even play out their “cloistered” role as a mere extension of their previous regiment, Ieyasu reported spent the remainder of his days pursuing his interest in neo-confucianist literature and the art of falconry, which was perhaps “what golf was is to political power in more recent times” . This fascination with pursuit of culture was not only restrained to just the shōgun and those occupying positions of high authority, but to the lower strata of the samurai class as well; it is documented that even the lower-ranking samurai of the time “studied the tea ceremony and incense appreciation and pursued scholarly studies under leading teachers of the domain.”

Although their original militaristic purpose was thrown into obscurity by a lack of (inter)national conflict and a brilliantly structured system of dominance set in place by the presiding generation of shōgun, such as the system of sankin kōtai, which ensured that the numerous daimyō would remain loyal and perhaps too occupied to incite domestic rebellion, the samurai and the members of the samurai class were still duty bound to fulfill their duty of “serving and staying by the side of one’s master.” Removed from the role of the warrior, samurai and the many lesser retainers of the domain instead served their lords as “government administrators… and companions” ; the members of the samurai class served as what can perhaps be considered public servant positions of today, as “police, firefighters, soldiers, tax collectors, administrators of granaries, ports, and roads.”

Another overlooked consideration often unmade when discerning the identity of the samurai is the role of women in the samurai society. Like their male counterparts, the sacred code under which women of the era were made to abide and live by was to “serve and stay by the side of one’s master”; though samurai women did not serve the daimyō or the shōgun through militaristic feats such as the men did, they were for all intents and purposes, seen as equal to their male counterpart as members of society whom occupy the highest social strata in the shi-nō-kō-shō hierarchy of early modern Japanese history. The importance of the samurai woman labor force was almost parallel to those of their male counterparts as samurai women were employed all over the domains of Tokugawa Japan in a multifarious positions from the Japanese equivalent of Tudor England’s “lady-in-waiting” to pages, guardians, transaction agents, cooks and fire wardens. The importance of these positions employed by the samurai women were almost parallel to that of the other posts occupied by their male counterparts, as women employed in the lowest strata of the samurai class as drudges reported made as much money as men who were employed as sandal-bearers or soldiers to the daimyō . Samurai women as joint members of the samurai class with the men, therefore, further propel the idea that the place of the samurai, regardless of his/her role in the grand scheme of things, was under the servitude of his/her lord.

In summation, barring numerous comparisons of the samurai as the “knights” of the European feudal systems aside, the identity of the samurai is a complex amalgamation of cultural and militaristic elements bound together by a common sense of duty of “serving one’s lord and staying by his side”; whether it was in battle or in matters of culture or domestic governance, members of the samurai class both men and women alike, despite their elevated status in the social hierarchy, were made to serve and tend to their lords and masters above every other purpose. Although their foundations were set under militaristic pretenses, the peaceful nature of the times that followed their installment into the social hierarchy transformed the samurai from spirited warriors to social representatives who mirrored the will of their lords to the lower classes of early modern Japanese society.