Know Your Picture Characters Entry #14
A. 鈴木一朗 B. 野茂英雄 C. 福留孝介 D. 松井秀喜 E. 松坂大輔
Before we start, I would like to offer special congratulations to Shirley, for making part of her response rhyme, and to A Fan, for bravely ignoring the fact that I said these were all players who had played in Major League Baseball and pulling out Sadaharu Oh.
It should come as no surprise that participants were 3-for-3 in identifying A, Suzuki Ichiro, the first and only man to hit an inside-the-park home run in an All-Star Game. After all, his page comes up on Wikipedia when you search just “Ichiro,” (a name that means nothing more than “first son”) and on this page it quotes his agent as saying that if you send a letter to Japan (a nation of over 127 million, roughly half of whom are someone’s first son) labeled with just that name, it will get to him.
We had a tie for the batting championship, with both Dragon and Shirley putting up a formidable .400. Dragon cleverly identified E as Matsuzaka Daisuke (or “Dice-K,” a nickname that more closely reflects the actual pronunciation than it deserves to), the first Japanese pitcher to win an MLB playoff game. Shirley, understandably, after having watched him play in the outfield of her beloved Cubs for the past few years, picked out C as Fukudome Kosuke, the man with two olympic medals (but, sadly, no gold, and, even more sadly, no World Series ring. But hey, there’s always next year.) A Fan, the pitcher’s best friend (the batter who swings at the same pitch every time) got only Ichiro. Perhaps he, like Brian Buchanan, should try spending a few years in the NPB in an attempt to revive his career.
There was no love for D, the 2009 World Series MVP, Matsui Hideki (or “Godzilla,” as he prefers to be called), but he played for the Yankees, so why should there have been? Batters were also perplexed by the forkball of Nomo Hideo, B, the first Japanese player to permanently relocate to the American major leagues.
Now I don’t know about you, but around here we’ve been having a fair amount of weather lately. Let’s see if you can dive into this list of basic weather-related kanji and pick out “wind” (and anything else you may feel jumps out at you.)
A. 雨 B. 風 C. 雷 D. 霧 E. 雲 F. 晴 G. 雪
Posted in Know Your Picture Characters | 4 Comments »
July 19th, 2010 at 8:00 am
I’m going to say E, which is some sort of strange Japanese weather vane. See, on the bottom is an E, which would seem to indicate that the win is blowing east. But it’s backwards, which of course means that the wind is blowing west. Apparently the wind never blew north and south in ancient Japan.
July 19th, 2010 at 8:00 am
Oh, and when I said I was going to say E, I of course meant that I was going to say G. The E, it distracted me.
July 20th, 2010 at 12:50 pm
I suppose I can’t get away with “they all mean wind” (although I think that’s a possibility, since there are probably a lot of different wordds in Japanese for different types of wind).
I’m going with E (really E, and not a mistaken way to say “G”).
To me, that’s clearly a hibachi being blown right off the picnic table.
July 20th, 2010 at 8:29 pm
This time,
No rhyme.
Except that one. Does it qualify as a Haiku? If not, it’s kind of like one isn’t it? Do I get points for it?
So,
A. Rain falling from little bitty cloud. Or maybe a dust storm falling from the itty bitty dust cloud.
B. It’s freezing and everything is solidified, but no cloud.
C. A radio with an antenna.——radio????. Well. maybe the antenna is covered by the big dark cloud.
D. Hail falling from medium size cloud.
E. Sleet falling from big dark cloud.
F. Sunny. No cloud and it does look hot.
And last, but far from least, G. Is it even conceivable that wind could be anything but G? And it’s blowing that pesky cloud away!