Coming soon is a tenuous title for this time of the year… after all, I’m about to embark on a protracted period of overtime work, and my time will be short for a while. Still, there are a few posts I want to make.
Who Are You?
Okay, I was spelunking the stats application for my website, and I have to say, some of you people are quite odd. Someone actually found my site by searching the keywords “bob marley belly button rings” over at msn. And I also discovered hits from places like California (a massive number of hits in fact), Taiwan, Israel, and other places. Now, I know the hits misattributed as coming from “North Korea” are accounted for by my own visits to the site, and by those of some friends and students in Korea. I know of a few people in Virginia, Saskatchewan, …
Freakin’ Trackback
Trackback should be working now… now on to getting my Awasu news aggregator all set up, and testing my own RSS feed (and making it available on my site). No rest for the wicked…
The Snow Country – Yasunari Kawabata (…and my musings on Western and Japanese modes of reconciling civilized life with human emotions…)
(I should begin this by saying I don’t know a damned thing about Japan. I know a few books, a few movies, and I’ve known a few people, but my knowledge of Japan relies solely on this. Therefore what I am writing about here involves a lot of what I imagine or induce from the literature and art I know about. It could be grossly erroneous. As always, if you think so, please do comment and tell me what else I should see, read, listen to, or look at. That said…) I have just, a few minutes ago, finished reading …
Times and Activities
Here’s a handout to be used with 20-sided dice, which works on present perfect and on telling times. The idea is, the students roll twice, to obtain a time and to obtain an activity. Then they role play phone calls from one to the other, at first just answering the phone and roleplaying as if they were in the middle of that activity. After a few tries, get them doing followup questions. Of course, the phone call is coming from overseas and the friend who is calling has no idea what local time is. So students get practice at transforming …