Beckham was a great soccer player.

An English soccer player, David Beckham has retired.

He was a really really great player.
Unfortunately, he has been getting too much attention for stuff other than soccer, but his achievement as a soccer player was outstanding.

I sometimes recall someone's comment;
"Although he is a super star, he is always running around the pitch. His physical activities in games are incredible."

I guess he is just a boy who genuinely love soccer, even now after he's become middle age, he is such a boy.

 Crying Beckham after his last game

 

I personally think he looks the best in a uniform of the England National team.

The scene which filled me deep emotion

After the the retirement ceremony of Hideki Matsui and the National Honorary Award ceremony for Matsui and Shigeo Nagashima, and before a game, there was the impressive opening pitch ceremony.

Pitcher: Hideki Matasui
Batter: Shigeo Nagashima, (aka Mr. Giants)
Catcher: Tatsunori Hara


The combination of the tree filled me with deep emotion.

For people outside Japan or people who are not fans of Giants, it's nothing special. However, I couldn't help writing this historic moment on the blog.

(By the way, the umpire in the opening pitch ceremony is Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.)

Surprisingly, Nagashima and Matsui wear a matching suit!! Tie and shirt too!!!

"Aung San Suu Kyi was such a jerk!"

 Aung San Suu Kyi went back to her country today after staying in Japan for about a week.

When I saw her interview on TV, every her comment and answer made me somehow feel unpleasant about her personality.

This morning, I was on the train and happened to see one of ads of a magazine. One of the headlines said "Aung San Suu Kyi, she was such a jerk!"

Wow, my feeling the other day was not necessarily wrong.

Aung San Suu Kyi and our Prime Minister Shinzo Abe

Happy Birthday to You... CHA CHA CHA??

As I've been writing here, I really love toddlers. I often visit several toddlers' blog sites which are written by their parents.

The other day, I saw the video in one of my favorite toddler blogs which showed 5-year-old boy's birthday party.

All the kids were singing;

Happy Birthday to you. CHA-CHA-CHA
Happy Birthday to you. CHA-CHA-CHA
Happy Birthday Dear
Happy Birthday to you. CHA-CHA-CHA

I heard the birthday song with CHA-CHA-CHA for the first time. It's fun.
I wondered if this CHA-CHA-CHA sound is hot among American kids. So I checked on the Internet.

Hmm...

Many American people are asking in the Internet that where CHA-CHA-CHA came from, where, when it started by who.

I see. Happy Birthday song with CHA-CHA-CHA seems to be a big hit with American kids.

Anyway, it's cute!

Tandoori Chicken

A restaurant I frequent provides Tandoori Chicken, though it's not an Indian restaurant. It's one of my favorite dishes in the restaurant.

Today, I tried cooking Tandoori Chicken at home. I checked several recipes on the Internet. It was more fuss-free than I thought.

But! It's not as tasty as one in the restaurant. What is the difference? Curry powder? Other seasonings? Should I have marinated chicken in sauce?

Hmm... I need deeper research. Also I have to go to the restaurant to eat the Tandoori Chicken again.

Anniversaries

11th March
The second anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake with big Tsunami

Although it's been already 2 years since then, over 300,000 people are still in evacuation life.
The nuclear power plants are still in dangerous situation.

20th March
The 18th anniversary of the Subway Sarin Incident

Surprisingly, it's been already 18 years. It is fading from people's memories, but it's a fact that there are still many people who suffer from something due to the Sarin incident, not only physically but also mentally.

Looking at the world,
20th March (Japan time)
The 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war
It was definitely a wrong war, there is no war which is not wrong though.



I wonder if there isn't an anniversary of good things.

Make peace with my past?

I put "7 Rules of Life" in the previous article, because I thought it said good things and I would try to follow those.

However, I'm not sure what it means to make peace with my past. I wonder if it means that you forgive your past mistakes, or that forgive someone who did something bad to you, or...

I don't know who wrote this "7 Rules of Life" so I have no idea where I should refer to.
So I've decided to interpret it as meaning that I should be positive about my past!

7 Rules of Life

New Idiom "at one's earliest convenience"

Whenever I use "as soon as possible/you can", I somehow feel as if I force a counterpart to do something urgently.

For example, I write on an email, "Could you give me a reply asap?"
Then I feel I would say, "Reply already! Hurry up!"

Although it's just my own feeling, I've been wondering if there is more soft and polite way. Then I found "at one's earliest convenience."

I'm not sure how the difference is between them for native speakers, but I'm quite satisfied with finding this idiom. (^o^)

My apartment is also under repair.

A major renovation work on my apartment started at thee beginning of this month. It is repairing the exterior wall. It takes more than 4 months!! Too long!

The scaffoldings (?) has almost constructed.

It's the scene from the window of my room.

From another window.

Terrible. The workers are walking just in front of my window.

There was a nice white sofa and table in the common space on the 1st floor, but now, it has been removed and a messy construction work office is now there.

I can't believe that this situation continues until the beginning of June!!

It's only exterior wall renovation, but from outside, It is as if I live in a construction site.

My apartment viewed from outside

However, because the apartment will become clearer (I hope so), I should be patient. Also I thank the workers for their work during such very cold weather.

Having said that, 4 months is too long------!

My smartphone is under repair.

Yesterday evening, a touch panel of my smartphone suddenly started responding strange. I had to tap something repeatedly, and long-tap no longer worked. It was almost impossible to enter characters. Terrible. It's been only 15 months since I bought it.

I went to a cell phone shop to ask repair. A staff said it would take a week or even 2 weeks to complete the repair. Ugh!
And, although I have an insurance policy, it may cost. Why?!?!

The staff also asked me that if it's OK that the data I saved in the smartphone and the apps I installed will be all lost and the setting I configured on the phone will be reset.
Ugh...
I'm using cloud system for the important data, so, OK, I'll give up other data. OK, OK, I'll take time to install all the apps again and to configure the same setting after my phone comes back. The top priority is repairing is completed as soon as possible.

Then, after I came back home, I realized I didn't back up the bookmarks! Uh---! I know it's possible to associate bookmarks with a Gmail address, but I didn't do that for several reasons. I should have done...

Furthermore, one more bad thing.
Although I was able to have an alternative device that was the same model, the color of it is pink! I don't like pink. I don't like something girly. It would have been better if it had been light soft pastel pink, but it was shocking pink! Haha.

I already miss my smartphone!

Meteor fall!!

February 15th, 2013, a big meteor fell in Russia. Since them, TV news have been reporting about this event every day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Russian_meteor_event

The diameter of the meteor was about 17m. Huge! Over 1200 people were injured mainly by shock wave. Shock wave!?!? Scary!

Hurricane, typhoon, earthquake, tsunami... there are many natural disasters, and I realized there is one more natural disaster, meteor fall, which comes from way too far away.

In this accident, I found meteor fall is very very dangerous. Having said that though, I'm still skeptical about the theory of dinosaur extinction by a meteor.
I've been wondering if it's possible that an only 10km diameter meteor can wipe out most of species on the earth 12700km across.

My profile is the top 1% most viewed.

I don't use SNS so much. I don't use either Twitter or Facebook. I just write this blog and joined LinkedIn which is a business specific SNS.

Today, I received an email from LinkedIn that says my profile in LinkedIn is one of the top 1% most viewed profiles for 2012. Surprising!!

I'm wondering why???

"in advance" vs. "beforehand"

I checked the difference between "in advance" and "beforehand" on the Internet. I saw some sites where people discuss the difference. But they don't reach any conclusion. OK, even native speakers are not sure about the certain difference, I could not know and don't need to worry about it.

However, probably native speakers distinguish them unconsciously. That's the difference between a mother language and a 2nd language.
In Japanese language, there are many which I know those are different but I can't explain the difference.

By the way, I somehow feel recently that I've gotten quite good at my English conversation skills.
Too positive or over-optimistic? haha!

Give it a What?

I found an idiom "Give it a shot" the other day. I learned it a long time ago, but I've completely forgotten it.

A couple of days later, I saw another a similar idiom "Give it a go", and I wondered what the difference was. I checked the dictionary but I couldn't find any specific difference.

I tried using Google Ngram which Tim kindly let me know. (Thank you, Tim!)

The result of a comparison;

 Hmm... Almost the same, but around 1985, it was inverted. But yet, no big difference.
 

By coincidence, just after I checked Google Ngram, I found an idiom "Give it a try."
So I tried checking Ngram again including "Give it a try."

Wow, "Give it a try" has been used overwhelmingly.
I somehow feel that "Give it a try" is subtly different from the other two.

Dont't speak so fast.

As one of resources for my learning English, I watch (or more precisely "listen") TED talks videos, one or two videos a week.

http://www.ted.com

Today, I listened the following.

He speaks so fast that I can't understand at all what he are speaking!!!
I saw the transcript and I found that he didn't say so difficult things. However, even though I listen to it seeing the transcript, I can't keep up with his speaking at all.

It is obvious that it's impossible for me to work abroad. In Japan, most of non-Japanese at companies in Japan speak slower and clearer. I guess there are many people in English speaking countries who speak like him.

M learning English never seems to end.

Value of human lives

The hostage crisis in Algeria ended up death of 37 hostages.

The situation the news were reporting indicate that most of the hostages weren't killed by the terrorists, but by the Algerian government army.

It's obvious that the purpose of the government army was just breaking down the terrorists from the beginning and their aims never included rescuing the hostages. Although it's important not to give in to terrorism, that would be unthinkable in Japan.
For example, when terrorists were moving to another place by five cars carrying the hostages in each car, the government army bombed them and the four cars of five were completely destroyed. Hard to believe!!

This reminded me of what one Chinese told me, who lived in Japan.
When he came to Japan, he was really impressed that Japan was a country which valued human lives. It felt strange to me first, but he explained some examples of how much China ignored human lives.

I think there are more countries where human lives are taken incredibly lightly.

7 Japanese people were killed in this hostage crisis in Algeria, and 3 Japanese people still remain missing.

Weekday Veg

I wrote "I should have more vegetable-focused diet" on this blog about a week ago.

However, I found that it's very difficult to cook perfect vegetarian foods.
As I need to increase the number of my recipes of vegetables, I was searching on the Internet. One of recipes I've found is a "baked Tofu with cheese."

1. Coat Tofu with flour
2. Coat them with beaten egg
3. Bake them with grated Parmesan cheese

Yummy!! (and easy!)

But!!

I realized that vegetarians never eat eggs and cheese, right?

But I don't mind. I'm not a vegetarian. Shouldn't be so strict!

Helping people is...

When I was walking along the street, one homeless person was standing holing a magazine up.

The magazine was "The Big Issue." You might know it. It is intended to help homeless people earn income and get back into society.

The Big Issue
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Issue

As I had been writing on this blog, what I was trying to be involved in is helping poor children in the world receive education. Actually I'm not so interested in the philanthropy toward Japanese people, because, even though some people are under terrible situation in Japan, their situation is MUCH better than people other than Japan I want to help. And homeless people in Japan are different from ones in other countries. Japan is a country where people can live without becoming a homeless person. In fact, there is NO street children in Japan.

I passed by the homeless person. I hastened to somewhere. However, I was having a feeling I wasn't sure about. Then, although I was already a bit far from him, I turned back to him and bought the magazine.

I realized that to help someone is not logic, but something urge which you can't help doing. In fact, the people who made great results in philanthropy areas started doing something immediately just after they thought so, such as Mother Teresa, John Wood and so on. In contrast, I do nothing special yet, I've been saying I want to help children though.

Water leak

Today, when I entered the vanity unit in my place, I saw the floor flooded. I didn't understand what happened for a while. Then I found the leak in the ceiling.

I called the management company of my apartment, and told the person upstairs what was happening and asked to shut off the main water as the person of the management company.

After a while, workers came and fixed it. Whew... It had me worried there for a while, but so far, so good.

It was good that today was a holiday. I spent half a day for it. And I thought that being a victim is better than being a person who caused damage. The person upstairs profusely apologized, although it's not her fault but the facility's.