cat /proc/claus

Paulo wrote in his blog that I was going to explain to everyone what the Golden Week is all about. Well, time to put on my “sempai hat” and make a brief explanation. (A very brief one)

Golden week is The first week of May, when there is a cluster of holidays in Japan. 29 of april is Green day, May 3 is “constitution day”, may 5 is “children (boys) day”, and may 4 (the best one) is “free day” - officially “public holiday”. If one of these days fall in a sunday, the day off is moved to the next monday, and if we have any workdays between the golden week, we usually take a day off. In this particular year we had a great golden week, for the arrangment of weekdays meant that only 1st and 2nd of may, monday and tuesday, were regular days - which, of course, were given away by most schools and companies.

The funny thing about golden week is that these days offs were moved around a lot just for the sake of golden week itself. “Public Holiday” day and “green day” were created specially for the golden week, and from 2007 on, green day will become “emperor showa” day, and “public holiday” will become “green day”.

All for historical accuracy, I’m sure

Yay.

And since I haven’t posted in a while, here is another link:

Panda in china has 16 babies last year.

Don’t click if you’ve got Diabetes.

One of my standing questions of japanese culture is about their main works of literature. Not knowing enough japanese to even read a simple book in the language, my knowledge about it is quite mediocre.

Sometimes I’ve asked myself what are, if there are any, the traditional romantic works of japanese literature. Romantic in the sense of a man in love with an idealized woman, for whom he suffers or perform great feats.

Today I was asking a japanese friend over the internet about that. She told me that she couldn’t remember any, only stories about filial love, or doing good deeds and receiving good rewards, but no stories about the love of a man and a woman.

Then she delivers this:

“I think there are no stories about “boy meets girl” [in japanese literature]. Sex and love were pretty taboo to talk about back then, I think. Well, there is the Tale of Gengi, which is pretty old and famous, but in truth Genji was just a worthless playboy”.

(the word in japanese was “fugainaipureiboi”)

For those not in the known, “The Tales of Genji” is actually THE first ’story’ written in japanese, and probably one of japanese most famous literary’s work. I’ve heard many things about it (yes, i need to grab an english translation and read it some day), but this is the first time I’ve heard anything like that about old Genji.

Cheers!

Highlighted, is a part of the response in google’s blog to its decision of censuring some search results in its chinese portal.

And yes, Chinese regulations will require us to remove some sensitive information from our search results. When we do so, we’ll disclose this to users, just as we already do in those rare instances where we alter results in order to comply with local laws in France, Germany and the U.S.

Ouch

This week a person asked me through mail about cultural shock.

It seems to me that, much more than the social norms that we see in travel books, Cultural Shock presents itself in a very diferent manner, and does not necessarily require a foreign country for that.

You see, what I have realized is that the biggest form of cultural shock can be the many little things that make your daily life, and not this monstrous ghost called “national idendity”. The TV channels you see when you were a kid, your favorite and most hated politicians, commons games at school.

I mean, I felt some cultural shock when I came to japan the first time. But I came to realize that it was a culture shock not because I was in japan, but because I was in a mostly-humanities university, among mostly people from economics, marketing, history, politics background. So no one would care for the latest slashdot story, or get a Microsoft joke. Or talk silly things about integrals and numbers, or care about spurious logic. Even the tone of the generic jokes were different. Not to say anything about brazillian “deep” culture, like Chaves.

I think these kind of common things connect people easier… make half sentences go through. In this way, I have felt this kind of cultural shock before, even before leaving Brazil.

On the other hand, this time out, I feel much more at home. The nerds in the lab understand me, and I understand them a lot too. It is reassuring to see them reading slashdot (even if the japanese one), or playing Final fantasy 5 for a few hours at my place.

I mean, today I was talking to a couple of friends from the Micro-processor lab, and it went like this.

“I should be in the food business - that is where the money is. Everyone needs to eat!”
“And what would you do?”
“I don’t know… I could do hamburgers… I know! MOS Burgers!”

And the funny thing is, there IS a burger chain in japan called MOS Burgers…

Of course, it opened the worm can for all kinds of “the burger needs more silicone” jokes.

… cringe …

Yeah, I’m in the right place.