Last night, a friend of mine who has been reading this blog for a while asked me what the 43 stands for in my domain name. I’m glad it’s not my age … yet. I wish it were my weight. LOL. It’s not my birthday. Nor is it the year I was born.

07734 If you can’t figure it out, then you’re not worth telling it to. Hehe!

Update:
Just got an e-mail from a good friend. He figured out what the 43 meant right away, after a 16-hour workday. I told you it was simple. LOL.

I can’t think of anything to write tonight. So I’ll just post my working hours and go to bed. Numbers stand for hours per week. Teaching hours vary on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

Monday 10
Tuesday 8-10
Wednesday 13
Thursday 14
Friday 10
Saturday 6-14

Oh, and by the way, about 43. I thought it would be sooo obvious (as clear as is the summer’s sun) what it stood for that at first I was reluctant to use it in my domain. But I guess not! LOL. Yee-haw. If any of you figure it out, lemme know.

Here is a little essay from one of my low-level adult classes. This particular student is not at all a typical Japanese, because he knows and cares about what the government is doing and protests against what he thinks is wrong. (The X’s are his original sentences, the O’s are my attempts at fixing up the sentences within the range of the students’ understanding.)

X: Entrance Management Law
O: Immigration Law

X: There was a meeting to be opposite to entrance management law last Sunday in Tsurumi, Kawasaki-shi.
O: Last Sunday, there was a meeting to oppose a present immigration law. The meeting was in Kawasaki-shi, Tsurumi.

X: I used Inogasira Line, Yamanote Line, Keihintouhoku Line and went to Kawasaki in order to participate in a meeting.
O: I attended the meeting. To get to Kawasaki, I took the Inogashira Line, the Yamanote Line, and the Keihintouhoku Line.

O: The meeting started at 12 and was over at 6.

X: There was a remark of the staying in Japan Korean whom this law objected to at a meeting.
O: During the meeting, a Korean living in Japan made a remark opposing this immigration law.

O: The reason why they object is that they have been discriminated against under this law.

X: They did not come to Japan by a-lover above all.
O: They did not come to Japan by choice.

X: It was the people whom their most had been taken to by the Japanese armed forces and was not able to come back to a mother country by various reasons after a war.
O: Most Koreans in Japan now are descendants of Koreans who had been brought to Japan forcibly by the Japanese army during the 30s and 40s. After the War they were not able to go back to Korea for various reasons.

X: It is not their responsibility that stay in Japan.
O: Because they were brought here by force, they should not have to bear the same legal responsibilities as other foreigners who want to stay in Japan.

X: When politics, economy become bad, an administrator can point at interest of nation forward the outside in order to gloss over misgovernment.
O: When politics and the economy become bad, politicians try to draw attention to away from themselves in order to gloss over their own misgovernment.

X: So they strengthen discrimination for staying in Japan.
O: So they increase the discrimination against Koreans and burakumin in Japan.

X: I am against such a discrimination and xenophobia.
O: I am against such discrimination and xenophobia.

X: I think that world people get over a word and a racial difference, and I should get along as well.
O: I think that people all over the world should get over language and racial differences and live together in peace.

In Japanese, there are no equivalents to the English sounds of “L” and “R.” One of the greatest problems among Japanese speakers of English is the confusion between the two letters. Hence, the word, “Engrish,” which means Japanese English. There’s a tremendously funny site for those of you who are interested in seeing a funny side of living in Japan.

After spending more than enough time with nose-pickin’, finger-lickin’ 8-year-old boys, I was glad to finally get to my TOEIC class. The students in that class are businessmen and grad students, all serious about studying. However, only one guy showed up tonight. He works for a press company associated with Reuters. Near the end of the 90-minute class, he asked me what I was doing in Japan, etc. (Shocker: He thought I was about 30 years old!! Have I aged that much recently??!! Or am I such a good teacher? LOL.) After finding out that my parents were missionaries, he wanted to know why missionaries go to a foreign country to try to spread a religion. Why don’t they stay in their own countries? After all, every country has its own religion and shouldn’t try to force its ways on others. We only talked for about half an hour, in which I sort of managed to tell him about creation of man, sin, the cross, resurrection, and a bit about the Trinity. He comes from a long line of Shinto priests. He says that next week, he will explain to me why Japanese can be Buddhist and Shinto at the same time.

There’s a video online showing the beheading of Daniel Pearl, a Jewish American journalist killed by terrorists. The FBI ordered the video removed but it’s back online again. It shows Islam for what it is … not that we need more proof.

I finished Leithart’s book last night. Fascinating reading.

As I was looking at the notes again, I have come to the conclusion that for this particular book, it was not an atrocity to have the notes at the end of chapters after all, because none of them were so terribly important to the content of the book itself. But of course while I was reading through the book, I had no way of knowing that, and kept looking for the notes.

In principle I think endnotes, whether at the end of chapters or books, are just plain wrong. I wonder if all the books published by Canon Press have chapter endnotes. As I look at the other 4 books I own published by Canon Press, none of them have any footnotes. Hmm. I only have 5 minutes till I have to run off to my next class tonight so I don’t have time to look for any other books we might have from that publisher.

Got a new private student last night. She’s a young (married) mother of a 2-year-old boy, works full time in a legal aid office, and is aiming to go to Yale Law School in a couple years and needs to brush up on her English. Should be interesting.

I’m totally exhausted. 13-hour workday today. At least it wasn’t 14 or 15. LOL.

This book finally arrived in the mail today. It looks like a bound photocopy, well-bound, but photocopied nonetheless. Yuk.

Anyway, I guess Poythress is next in line. Should start reading him as soon as I finish up Leithart and Tasso. I have three books by Alter waiting on my shelf. Ooooh. So nice to have books lined up in order.

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide To Select Ancient Literature by Peter J. Leithart

280 pages down, 100 more to go. Finished the epics, starting Greek plays. I’ve enjoyed reading Leithart’s analyses of the epics more than the epics themselves. Now, before I ruin your reading experience with my comments on the book (how many of you have read it, anyway? :), allow me to offer my personal feelings about some of its other aspects.

• Cover Design: Good
• Binding: Sturdy for a Paperback
• Paper Quality: Good
• Page Layout: Well-Designed
• Printing Quality: Beautiful
• Font Readability: Excellent
• Notes: TERRIBLE (Notes are put at end of chapters instead of at bottom of page)
• Index: NONEXISTENT

Joys
Very exciting to rediscover stories I read when I was 10 and 11, but this time, to see them illuminated in a totally different light. When I was very young, I was fascinated by the Greek Myths, the Iliad, and the Odyssey and read them through and through but have never studied any of them. When I finish, this book will have constituted my entire education in Greco-Roman literature. LOL. There are quite a number of chiasmi and chiasmic structures described in the book. Sometimes, I wonder if the ancient authors actually intended to have so many, but the chiasmus is a basic and common literary structure and Leithart’s explanations make a lot of sense.

Though there are traces of “Christian” influence visible in the Greek epics, and even more so in the Roman, and though I think I can understand how some Christians can be carried away by the beauty in them, the utter paganism in complete antithesis to the Bible sickens me: the Greeks’ idea of war being the state of being punctuated by brief periods of peace; their willingness to act like homicidal maniacs so that they can be glorified as gods and enjoyed foreverafter in those epics of theirs; the Romans’ pursuit of peace and justice built on war and unjust killings; the hatred, fear, contempt shown by men towards women throughout all the stories. This list could go on endlessly….

Frustrations
The book, like all the others I’ve seen from Moscow, are designed with good taste. What was totally incomprehensible to me is why they would choose to use chapter endnotes instead of footnotes. All the other details of the book being so wonderful made this outrage all the more glaring. Chapter endnotes are worse than endnotes at the end of books. At least if the notes are at the end of a book, you can keep an extra bookmarker there and flip back quickly. When they are at the end of chapters, you have to constantly be flipping all over the book looking for the end of each chapter. It’s crazy. The lack of an index was also totally mystifying. Footnotes can be inserted with a single command (or you can click, if you must) and an index can be made with 2 clicks. Why, why, why?

Homosexuality
How can someone write a book about Greeks, their literature, and culture, and not even mention it? OK. Peter Green, one of the greatest scholars of the 20th century, wrote one of the greatest and most scholarly biographies of Alexander the Great and managed to ignore this. I never knew anything about this until I read John Maxwell O’Brien’s fascinating biography of Alexander in which he points out that when Hephaestion, Alexander’s alter ego died from overdrinking, Alexander cut his hair, held grand funeral games, offered human sacrifices (massacred all the men of a certain tribe as a sacrifice to Hephaestion’s spirit). etc., all in imitation of what Achilles supposedly did for his best “friend” Patroclus at his death. Since homosexuality was such a great part of ancient Greek culture, and since he dealt with other topics in depth, I was rather surprised that Leithart did not touch upon this subject at all in his discussion of the epics.