Oscars

アカデミー賞おめでとう！

A Japanese film, おくりびと (Departures) won the Academy Award for Best Film in a Foreign Language . . . for the first time!  Rashomon apparently only won some sort of "honorary" award?  Anyway, the film is about a cellist who moves to the country and takes a job as a mortician--I'm gonna try to see it in Kanoya (the closest city) now that it will be playing in Japanese theaters for the next couple years.  Un filme japonais a emporté l'Oscar pour meilleur filme dans une langue étrangère--pour la première fois !  Il fallait que le verifie--apparemment, les filmes de Kurosawa n'ont jamais reçu un tel honneur.  Je tâcherai de voir le filme, vu qu'il va tourner dans les salles de cinéma ici jusqu'à l'année prochaine !

I've been mulling a post on subcategorization for a while, but in the meantime here's some particularly fun Japanese words I've come across in a past week.

生意気 (namaiki): impertinent, saucy, cheeky

天変地異 (tempenchii): a convulsion of nature

and the weirdest one, しめた (shimeta), which in my super-refined Japanese-English dictionary is only defined in the context of the sentence "At that moment I felt like wow."

Which made me think of the song "Like Wow," a song by the impertinent Leslie Carter.  I think it's on my computer because it was on the Shrek soundtrack.  Anyway, the point is, life is tough and sometimes calls for songs like this (though I can see why they might make the rest of the world hate us).

Bee-tee-dubs, the chorus' lyrics are in fact, in their entirety:

Ooh, hey, what?  It's like wow! (x4)