Speeches and holy coffee

You know those days where you just about manage to roll out of bed, and all you can think of is where the next deity in a can will come from well my friends/friend (depending on how many people read this blog) Japan has something special for you...

And behold GOD wandered around his kitchen in his slippers and behold he had a thirst.

He saw a can of coffee and he was pleased.

But he smitted the makers anyway just to make sure...


Anyway today was our second round of speech contests in Omihachiman. Some story titles that stood out this year this year included, "Something I can do because I'm Japanese" (which I thought would be something to do with all that intestine length) and my personal favourite "Sausage nose". We sadly only heard 2 stories of family members dying (one was a dog, but hey it still apparently inspired the story teller to enter the competition) And I still don't really understand the story of Buddha, the spider web and the sinner. But with at least one more speech contest I've got time to learn I suppose.
Me and our Japanese teacher were pleased to see our entry try her best reading about Snow white, after about 2 months of practice its amazing how the little words "she ran blindly between the tall trees" rapidly become the bane of your life. Sadly she didn't win, although thankfully she actually wasn't that disappointed which makes a nice change from last year when we had to console a host of weeping students.

This weekend its rest and relaxation at home, with my Neapolitan chicken, The Blade runner DVD (not the fancy pants version though) and T.O.H for company. Oh but I should quickly mention one thing.
I've already talked about the difficulty of adapting kids books into the films or rather the strange need to alter core values of the book to appeal to what the director/producer/movie company/ and anyone else involved I can think off ( like an Oscar speech styleeie) thinks will appeal to a wider audience. Like the adaptation of "The Seeker" the second in the Dark is rising series, talked about faaarrr better in The written word than I could, from all accounts the vast changes to the book don't seem to have worked at all and make the film appear like a cheap Harry Potter rip off when in fact it predated the magical boy wizard (who is never wrong yet each year his friends always think he's making things up before being proved yet again that he was correct blah blah blah). Anyway fingers crossed its appears that the adaptation of Northern lights the first in Phillip Pullmans fantastic His Dark Materials trilogy might have better luck, for a start the casting seems great; with Daniel craig, Nicole Kidman (despite that email from warners claiming films with leading ladies are dead), Sam Elliott and I think the voice of Ian Mckellen. For a start sticking to English actors rather than Americanising everything score points with me; secondly it appears they haven't shied away from keeping the religion vs science theme which will be very interesting considering the third book (which I won't talk about for fear of spoiling the plot.) and thirdly well its got massive polars bears fighting! so really, what else do you need???