Beautiful Bits, Weird Pieces & Cute Kids

Here are some shots of kids at the zoo. I'm still working through shots that I took when we all went to Ueno a couple of weeks ago, and some of my favorites are yet to come. The girl at the top right belongs to our friend. I really love her expression here. Don't you?

Well, I wanted to throw out a few bits and pieces. Here goes.

The other day I turned on the TV just in time to see a man explaining to a group of women how to nurse a baby. He grabbed his "breast" and raised a plastic baby that he was holding up in the cradle position. A semi circle of women watched, mimiced (minus the grabbing) and nodded enthusiastically as if to say, "We've never seen this before." Which was probably true. "Next," he said, "is the 'football' position." I flipped the channel then, but later I came back just in time to see him squeeze a balloon, bring it to his mouth and "latch on." I yelled for my wife to come see. Finally, another guy (a popular American face who speaks fluent Japanese) brought the show to closure by holding up a sign that said, in English, "Beautiful Breasts." Plus, he had illustrated the card with a cartoon drawing of, you guessed it, breasts (which little sunbeams coming out). This was to emphasize the point of the show, to encourage women to breast feed their babies. Japanese women used to universally nurse, but in the past couple of decades many have switched to bottle feeding instead. I won't go into discussing that; I was just amused that they chose a man to deliver (and demonstrate) this message. Maybe someone figured women wouldn't listen to another woman giving "medical" advice. Or that any doctors who might be watching wouldn't care less what a nurse or La Leche expert spokeswoman might have to say. Probably more than 90 percent of the doctors in Japan are men, and so the message (to be heard well) needed to come from a man. Just my thoughts. Or maybe they just didn't think about it. Japanese TV is just weird sometimes.

In other news, I've just switched to the Firefox browser (two thumbs way up). Moving on, I don't know who I'm voting for in the US election. Strike that, I haven't applied for an absentee ballot yet, so I'm too late anyway. I was checking out some other blogs today, and everybody is writing about politics. Everybody in the USA, everyone in Africa, in Australia. At least they've stopped offering GMail referrals. That was pretty sad.

Ok, here is something more related to life in Japan. A couple of weeks ago I sent an email to a photographers email list here in Japan asking if anyone had a Palm type PDA that they weren't using anymore. I was hoping to buy, but a very nice someone offered to give me her old Palm 3xe. I picked it up Monday, went home and loaded up KingKanji. If you want to learn Kanji and own a Palm type PDA (or Win CE device), get this program. You can find it here.

Posted by jw at October 6, 2004 10:32 PM