"She says she talks to reindeer" is in fact a misheard lyric

- So Esther eponis recently linked to this article (Male Homosexuality and Popular Culture in Modern Japan), and it's fascinating, really well done. If you're even sort of interested in gender-roles in culture, I'd recommend looking at this -- particularly the sections around #20, like 18-24 or so. But the whole thing is great, and this look at Japanese culture gives us a springboard for thinking about our own. Hut:

The spectacle of these non-white foreigners (a very small minority group in Japan) using the Japanese language in an extremely animated diatribe against homosexuals generated, among the Japanese audience, not concern but comedy.

- Today's been pretty low-content. It's been cold and rainy, and I finished up my shopping in the early afternoon. I'm looking forward to heading up to Atlanta for the psiu Third Day of Christmas Party -- it's looking like Lloyd is coming with, yay! So I think go I'll sit and translate for a while.

- Hrmmm. Hope alla (Allah?) you kids are having a nice Christmas Eve. Give your people a hug for me :)

'(we could probably be doing better in the president department)

- Underground revolutionary. Environmentalist. Engineer. Track star. World traveler. Polyglot. Visionary. Valdas Adamkus, president of Lithuania.

- He's probably on the order of as cool as Tarja Kaarina Halonen, the president of Finland. I mean, she has pictures of her cats on her website. Er, and also very humanitarian, social-democratic sorts of goals. But mostly cute kitties.

- Interestingly, Lithuanian apparently has a very strong connection to proto-Indo-European and way more cases (including instrumentative and ablative and...) and verb tenses than English. And it has a velar fricative phoneme! And about four million native speakers...