Notes From The Tiger’s Cave

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Want to spice up your boring tweets on twitter.com?? Stick a Japanese emoticon on the end! There are hundreds of these creative little character doodles and they are a lot of fun.

Here are a few to get you started:

(^_^)/ Hi!
(^0^)/ Hi there!
( ^^) smile
(^O^) glad!
(~o~) yawn
(^-^;) cold sweat
(-_^) wink
(`O`) sing a song
(@_@) What???
(~^~) I’m proud
m(__)m
(^_^)/~~ bye~~
(=^_^=) a cat
(o|o) Ultra-man

They’ll only take you so far. For more info about emoticons check out Paperdiaries.com, the site of a certain Ms. Aya, where I found the ones listed above:

http://paperdiaries.com/2008/09/guide-to-japanese-text-emoticons-and-chibi-facial-expressions/

Ms Aya’s blog is an enjoyable read in its own right (or “write”), and Ms Aya ain’t necessarily what you might suppose… but she is a cool Asian lady!

I found Ms Aya’s blog on Google when looking for a specific Japanese text icon to tag onto the end of a Valentine’s Day Tweet - see, http://twitter.com/hirohurl .

Twitter is a great little tool and every day more and more resources are appearing on the web.

Want to see how your Twitter following compares to your friends’ and rivals’ - see http://twittercounter.com/

If your graph is looking a bit “limp” you might be interested in this new free resource which will get you a whole bunch of new followers WITHOUT having to follow them first - http://tweetergetter.com/hirohurl .

You don’t even have to give up your email address, and it takes less than 30 seconds to sign up and go!

David Hurley
Internet Marketing Success Strategies

read comments (1)

Someone called Jimmy contacted me the other day about the Japanese mahjong sets available on http://japanese-mahjong.com to ask whether I could offer any sets of a similarly high quality with… Western numerals in the top right corner…

I explained that that was a big no-no as far as my site was concerned. Only genuine Japanese mahjong sets there, I’m afraid!

Anyway, I checked out the link in Jimmy’s signature and found out that he had made an interactive sudoku game:

http://www.sparkleinteractive.co.uk/sudoku/

“Sudoku” is a compound Japanese word that combines the characters for “number” (su) and “single” (doku). The sudoku puzzle was invented by an American architect called Howard Garns and was originally called “Number Place” when it was published in an American magazine in 1979.

In 1986 it was published in a Japanese puzzle magazine under the name “Sudoku”. Subsequently, the game was reimported into America and Europe and the Japanese name stuck, doubtless giving the puzzle an air of oriental mystery.

Funnily enough, in Japan the puzzle has been renamed “Nanpure”, pronounced “nan-poo-ray”. This is a good example of the way modern Japanese takes foreign words, mashes them together to form a new “Japanese” word. In this case, the words are “number” and “play” (or perhaps “place” from the original name of the game)…

Number = “Nanbaa” = “Nan”

Play = “Pure”
“Nan” + “Pure” = Nanpure!

So you could say that “Sudoku” is the English word for Japanese “number play”, or vice versa!

Now we have sorted that out, here’s a game for you to play!

read comments (0)

Ah, it must be spring in Japan - it is freezing cold outside, and boxes of dried soybeans with demon-mask covers on them are flying off the shelves of Madam Joy, our local supermarket.

It is Setsubun today, the day when winter officially turns into spring just in time for the coldest few weeks of the year to set in.

Now the chief superstitious practice of the natives of these islands upon this occasion is called Oni-yarai, or kicking the demons out of the homestead. According to the ancient rites of this ceremony, the father of the house is supposed to assume the role of the demon and put on the demon-mask while the rest of the family members hurl dried beans at him while yelling,

Demons out! Good luck in!

Why it should be thought that hurling dried beans at a demon-masked patriarch should effect the expulsion of vice and the import of luck is a mystery that has been veiled by the mists of antiquity.

I hear that death by choking on dried soy beans is the chief cause of geriatric mortality in these parts at this time of year. The reason for this is attributed to the fact that after the beans have been liberally tossed in the direction of the demon each member of the family eats as many of them as the years of his mortal existence.

I suppose the moral of the story in these recessionary times might be that if we had all taken a little more care in counting our beans we would not have been confronted by the demon of debt and depression.

Or perhaps the pantomime of hurling beans at demons while chanting that wickedness should be expelled and luck brought in is a crude dramatization of the prodigality of human folly and the absurd and presumptuous vanity of supposing that the mere and oft repeated assertion that something should be is the same as its actually being so.

Lord, what fools these mortals be!

And so they are!

Let us cast away this foolish mummery of masks and beans, this idle chatter about demons and luck.

Let us grasp the nettle and go forward in the knowledge that it is not what we say, nor external conditions, evil fortune or good luck, but the quality of our thoughts and actions that make us or mar us.

David Hurley

read comments (0)