Toy Story

If I have developed one vice during my short time here, it’s wasting money on various toys at the mall. Predictable, I suppose. But dangerous, nonetheless. I am particularly proud of the Gloomy Bear that now sits atop my television set. If I am not mistaken, Gloomy is the adorable bear who children love but, for some reason, he must feast on human flesh. The bottom of the box that it came in depicts gloomy clandestinely slashing away at the corpse of a young boy. Gloomy is apparently the product of the imagination of Japanese comic artist Mori Chack, whose towering blond afro threatens to overshadow his work, both literally and figuratively.



The little turtle guy comes from a series that depicts him participating in various exciting activities (jumping out of a plane, riding a dirt bike), all while maintaining a look of complete apathy on his face. He is, apparently, one jaded turtle.

When I returned to the office today after a full day of teaching shougakkou, my coworkers appeared to be in the middle of a discussion on the topic of hurricanes. In Japan, typhoons are simply numbered (1,2,3, etc.), so they were quite perplexed as to why Katrina was named so. "Do all hurricanes have women's names?" my supervisor asked. After explaining to him the alphabetical naming convention that is followed he noted that "m" is only three letters away and asked me, "Will they name it hurricane Mehan?" I told him I didn't think that they would.

(In other hurricane related news, the American Red Cross is accepting disaster relief donations via Yahoo)