A Riddle...

If on a random Thursday afternoon while at work you receive a humongous box from a friend who has recently moved to Japan, what is the best thing you could possible find inside of it???

Answer: An assortment of like 50 different kinds of super yummy snacks and a fantastically cute and uber Japanesie wrapped birthday gift!!! I am being good and waiting til next week to open the gift, but boy am I enjoying the snacks!!!

Thank you Maggie-chan. A million times thank you!!

Deko Boko Friends

I LOOOOOOVEEEEE this so hard, Deko Boko Friends is the cutest thing ever! Check out these characters:

Acorn Tots (どんぐりん Dongurin from 団栗 donguri meaning acorn. Adding an 'n' makes the name not only cute sounding, but more personal.)
The Acorn Tots are five small acorn-children who hold one large acorn in both hands. They are best friend and rivals. Each tries to be better than all the rest.

Belly Boing A.K.A The fat kid (くいしんボン Kuishinbon from 食いしん坊 kuishinbou meaning glutton.)
Belly Boing is constantly thinking of food. He likes eating sweets, and he can create a drum sound by pounding on his large stomach.

Big Oggo & Mu Mu (オオガーラとムクムク Ōgāra to Mukumuku literally Ōgāra and Mukumuku from 大柄 ōgara meaning large build and 尨犬 mukuinu meaning shaggy dog)
Despite his image as a lumbering giant, Big Oggo is very sweet and lovable with an affinity to anything cute.

Mu Mu is his friend, a pink toy poodle who curiously moo's instead of barking.

Disabear (あなくま Anakuma from 穴 ana meaning hole and 熊 kuma meaning bear)
Disabear uses plates he tosses on the ground to make holes. He whistles while he walks and uses an accent.

Grandma Fuji (ふじおばば Fuji Obaba from 富士 fuji meaning Mount Fuji and お祖母さん obāsan meaning grandmother)
Grandma Fuji is the epitome of Japanese tradition. She enjoys singing enka, writing haiku, calligraphy, and hosting tea ceremonies.

Kaki Kaki (サボサボ Sabosabo from サボテン saboten meaning cactus)
Kaki Kaki is a cactus like boy. He is extremely nervous and timid, his spines fall off whenever he is surprised or scared.

Ken Bahn (ケン・バーン Ken Bān from 鍵盤 kenban meaning keyboard)
Ken has a keyboard for teeth and he plays them whenever he is in a good mood. He likes to wobble and lean as he walks.

Klinki Klunki (カランコロン Karankoron from カラン コロン karan koron meaning an onomatopoeia for the reverberating sounds of tinkling bells or a glass tapped by ice)
Klinki is very laid back and hates when juice falls out of his glass, because his face shrinks. He likes to see everyone as laid back as he is.

Melodina (メロディーヌ Merodīnu from メロディー merodī meaning melody)
Melodina is very musical. She even makes her speech resemble a melody. She likes to skip and when she does she makes sounds like a toy piano.

Nut'n Nose (はなはなマロン Hanahana Maron from 鼻 hana meaning nose and マロン maron meaning chestnut)
Nut'n Nose resembles a chestnut. Quite possibly from his love of Mont Blanc, an Italian dessert cake made with the nut. His nose can be inflated like a balloon, and when he tries hard to do something, his tail swings.

The Prince Egg (たまごおうじ Tamago Ōji literally Egg Prince from 卵 (also 玉子) tamago meaning egg and 王子 ōji meaning prince)
The Prince Egg is a prince of an unknown kingdom. His egg hat boils and cracks when he gets angry. When the pieces fall to the floor, he picks them all up, using tiny brisk steps.

Water Chap (じょうろう Jourō from じょうろ jouro meaing watering can)
Water Chap has a head like a watering can, which he uses like one to grow flowers and give them as gifts.

The creator also designed the Qoo mascot. I soooo want the group photo as another tattoo.

And in case you don't speak Japanese, Deko Boko is a kind of slang for being uneven or lop-sided (kind of like a Japanese version of Kapakahi).

An Open Letter to Will Shortz, Editor of the New York Times Crossword Puzzle

Dear Mr. Shortz,

As I am sure both our time is valuable, I'm not going to mince words. What is your problem? Why, pray tell, was this week's Sunday Crossword so simple, its caliber was at a Monday level. Yes, yes, you threw in a reference to Emile Durkheim, but that is Wednesday material, at best.

If this is your idea of a sick joke or some plot to give me a false sense of confidence, I do not appreciate your sense of humor. I suspect your plan is to lure me into doing the Crossword in pen, only to devastate me with clues regarding opera and archaic English vocabulary that has fallen out of use. Thank you Mr. Shortz, but no thank you. This pencil and trusty eraser will stay firmly in hand!

Good day sir. I said Good day!
Sarah

p.s. By the by, if you so happen to have the phone numbers of fellow Wordplay commentators, Jon Stewart or Mike Mussina (Go Yankees!), feel free to hook a girl up.

Julia Roberts is Wrong

You know in the movie Steel Magnolia's where Julia Roberts tells her mom that she would rather have a few minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special? Well, Shelby was completely wrong. Sometimes nothing special is fine and dandy.

Take today for instance, perhaps this is what they term the calm before the storm, but today has been perfectly ordinary (aside from me walking to work with a wooden baseball bat slung over my shoulder -don't ask). The day is so strangely ordinary in fact I can't really think of a suitable adjective to describe it. So I guess I will describe it with things that it has no business at all being compared to:

If today were a food it would be a casserole made with Campbell's soup.

If today were a TV show it would be Family Ties or maybe M.A.S.H.

If today were a kitchen utensil it would be a turkey baster. Perfectly utilitarian in nature and supremely content sitting in your drawer until needed. It has none of the excitement of say a pizza cutter nor does it bring about the same enthusiasm of an ice cream scoop. But that's okay.

If today were a musician it would be Billy Joel. Don't get me wrong, everyone likes Billy Joel, but I've never seen anyone passionate about Billy Joel.

If today were a body part it would be a kind and considerate pair of eyes, but the kind that don't make a big deal of themselves.

Yes, that perfectly describes what today is. Perhaps when nothing bad happens the day is a good one by default?

I'm guessing this is what Sean Lennon meant when he sang "nothing feels better than okay".



PS: I was at the above concert in Boston in 2007.

Under Pressure....

It's 9:20 at night and I am still at the office trying to finish the neverending jury instructions from hell. Under Pressure is playing on the radio...so apt. It's like some higher force gave me a shout out. Just waiting for Delilah to come on and say...and that one went out to Sarah (I imagine she would over emphasize the h so that I knew she meant me).

No one has ever dedicated a song to me, so I will take what I can get...

Looks like and another statue kind of week. Sigh. Hoping to be the pigeon soon.

One Love, Lama Surya Das, One Love

I subscribe to the Dzogchen Center's Weekly Words of Wisdom, which are sent out weekly (duh) via email. I'm not terribly religious, so the quotes that are mainly just some interesting things to ponder or some secular words of advice are a bright spot to my week. Some past favorites are as follows:

Compassion is an attitude,
Love is an action.
~ H.H. the Twelfth Gyalwang Drukpa

The time to be happy is now,
The place to be happy is here,
The way to be happy is to make others so.
~ Robert Ingersoll

Ring the bells that still can ring
forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything
that's how the light gets in.
~ Leonard Cohen

If you want to win the war with your mind, you'll be at war forever.
~ Adyashanti

We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same.
~ Carlos Castaneda

If you haven't got any charity in your heart,
you have the worst kind of heart trouble.
~ Bob Hope

Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom.
~ Theodore Isaac Rubin

This is the one I received today, which totally made my smile because of the eclecticism of the selection:

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our minds.
~ Bob Marley


I have also been thinking about this quote a lot lately:

Accept that some days you’re the pigeon, and other days you’re the statue.
-Roger C. Anderson

I've had a statue kind of week. Hope things will start looking up soon :)

Dear Diary, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

The last 2 books I completed were The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers and Deary Diary by Lesley Arfin. Here is a little about each:

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is possibly the best thing ever written, or at least the best thing I have ever read. Keep in mind, I am a complete sucker for a story about a group of lonely misfits so perhaps my opinion is slightly swayed. In any case, Carson McCullers is a phenomenon. I can hardly believe she wrote this at the age of 23 and the book was originally published in 1940, it is timeless. McCullers writes with such compassion for her characters and without even a bit or pretension. She's the kind of person I could not imagine uttering a word like "exquisite", let alone forcing her characters to. This is basically my favorite kind of author. If reading is not your thing, check out the film. The story is too wonderfully sad and sweet to miss.

The other book I just completed was Dear Diary by Lesly Arfin. This was published in conjunction with Vice, so I kind of thought from the get go that it would be lame. Turned out to be okay, slightly better than meh. Meh plus. It's basically Arfin's memoir, chronicling her adolescence and early twenties complete with heroin addiction and rehab. What I primarily enjoyed about it were the pop culture references. Reminded me a lot of high school, and how I liked punk and my favorite band was ALL. Or that time I cut my shoulder length "girl, you'll be a woman soon" hair off by grabbing a pair of scissors and half-hazardly snipping off chunks of it. Turned out kind of cute. Or how many of you had a JanSport backpack that you wrote all over with a Sharpie? I remember having an SST records sticker on mine.

Wow, I wish I was even half as cool as all that now sounds. Really, I was just a silly geek who was lucky enough to find some really good friends. Some things change and some things stay exactly the same.