A. 大いなる遺産　B. 虚栄の市　C. 荒涼館　D. ジェーン･エア

E. 宝島　F. 不思議の国のアリス

One reader described this week’s answers as “the best response ever.”  It’s certainly the longest response ever, and as we all know after taking the previous week’s quiz on Harry Potter books, the longest one is always the best . . . right?

Theoman tried his hand at guessing every single one of them, but unfortunately he got them all correct, so there’s not much funny to say about that.  I’m sure his grandmother will be proud that he apparently knows more about Victorian novels than he does about the works of Rowling.

This week’s responses included a fair amount of pro-Trollope outrage, which I have to say was not entirely unexpected.  I did finally figure out how his name is pronounced in Japanese–Tororoppu–but I still don’t even know if any of his works have been translated into Japanese, so I don’t know what any of their titles would be.  A Fan’s suggestion of Kanshu for The Warden seems as good as any to me, provided he means the kind of warden that runs a prison.

A Fan clearly believes that turnabout is fair play; he likes to give answers where I have to try to figure out what he means in response to the challenge, where he is supposed to figure out what I mean.  I’ll take a crack at it.  I was made to read two of these in high school, but based on a later response I’m going to guess that he means Great Expectations, which is correct for A.  The one that’s fun to read as a kid could only be Treasure Island, which is not B.  As far as I know, Bleak House has never been made into a Disney movie, so his next guess probably refers to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (or, in Japanese, “Alice in/of the Mysterious Land”), which is also incorrect.  I had to look up Vilette to learn that it was written by one of those Brontes, as was Jane Eyre, which he correctly identified as D (so far he’s 2-for-2 on books I had to read in high school).  The most overrated one on the list must be Vanity Fair, which makes A Fan so mad that he can’t even spot it properly.  This leaves us with Bleak House, which was not correctly identified, but we would still like to thank A Fan for copy-pasting roughly two-thirds of the book along with his answers.

A quiz on Victorian literature was Shirley’s suggestion in the first place, so I suppose she has a right to make comments about who should have been included, but isn’t Jane Austen really more Georgian than Victorian?  This isn’t exactly my field of expertise.  Perhaps blinded by rage at the exclusion of authors like Eliot and Trollope, she did not do as well as A Fan, but she did manage to find Treasure Island, and if you’re going to hunt for something, wouldn’t you much rather find an island full of treasure than, say, a dismal house?  Discuss.

So, you like Victorian novels?  I like . . . baseball.  This week we are having the KYPC Baseball Team Identification Challenge: Central Division.  Since there is no designated hitter in KYPC, teams could come from either the American League (Indians, Royals, Tigers, Twins, White Sox) or the National League (Astros, Brewers, Cardinals, Cubs, Pirates, Reds).

A. 王族　B. 白足袋　C. 醸造者　D. 虎　E. 双子　F. 幼獣

A. アズカバンの囚人　B. 賢者の石　C. 死の秘宝　D. 謎のプリンス

E. 秘密の部屋　F. 不死鳥の騎士団　G. 炎のゴブレット

We hope that Theoman will be reassured to learn that KYPC is a place where ambition will always be rewarded.  Maybe not with money, or success, or some vague, incomprehensible point system, but it will be rewarded on some deep level.  That being said, let’s look at the results.  Overall he did well, getting five of the seven he attempted.  If we wanted to be mean and discount the answers containing katakana, which I believe he knows quite well, then he only gets two out of four.  But still: ambition!  It’s good . . . for some reason!

A Fan did well as well, though several of his answers could have applied to any number of books.  A, however, is Prisoner of Azkaban, which as far as I know has the same title on both sides of the pond.  “The one where Snape is mean to Harry” could be any book, except possibly the 7th, so his guess for B is technically correct as well–it’s the 1st, Sorcerer’s/Philospher’s Stone, the book in which we are introduced to the concept of Snape being mean to Harry.  “The one with snogging” could be Book 5, 6, or 7 (and possibly also 4), so he strikes again with C, Deathly Hallows.  We will skip over any potential arguments that D might raise about the greatest British fantasy author–other than to say that it is Half-Blood Prince (or, in Japanese, Mysterious Prince)–and note that while ambition is rewarded here, seriousness is not so much; A Fan’s one “real guess” fell flat, because E is Chamber of Secrets.  Personally, I think his guess for F was his best, both because it only refers to one book (at least in my opinion) and because it is correct: F is Order of the Phoenix, easily the too longest of the 7 books.  G, however, is neither the interesting nor the boring part of the last book.  It’s Goblet of Fire.

Shirley, unfortunately, had no correct answers, though it seems like she was on the right track.  The thing that she identified as a phoenix rising from the ashes in G is, I assume, the first character, which means “flame.”  E, all “buttoned down and locked up,” does contain the word “secret(s)”.  And we can’t blame her for mistaking “hallows” for “hollows,” because frankly I’m still not sure that “hallow” is a legitimate noun.  But she shouldn’t get too down; next week’s challenge may be a bit more up her alley.

Let it never be said that I do not give in to requests: the next challenge is on Victorian literature.  Try your luck with these works from the mid- to late 19th century: Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and Great Expectations, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.  My apologies to any Anthony Trollope fans, but there is no Japanese Wikipedia article about him, which makes it difficult to look up the titles of his works.

A. 大いなる遺産　B. 虚栄の市　C. 荒涼館　D. ジェーン･エア

E. 宝島　F. 不思議の国のアリス

THIS JUST IN!  STOP THE PRESSES!  DRAGON HAS SUBMITTED A LAST-SECOND ENTRY!

It would be a shame to just let all her hard work go to waste without getting a chance to poke fun at it, so let’s take a look.  Hmm . . . it appears her first guess is actually correct.  But of course there are kanji for “Azkaban.”  They look like this:

預鞄

They mean “taking a bag into custody,” which doesn’t make a lot of sense, but you could read them as azukaban . . . though I doubt any Japanese person would.  I like her reasoning for guessing that C is Order of the Phoenix, but apparently the worst title in Japanese doesn’t match the worst book (though if we accept A Fan’s division of Deathly Hallows, Part I: The Long Camping Trip (and more snogging), then maybe it does).  Her guess for D is also correct, and the character that she identified as being so complicated actually means “puzzle” or “riddle”.  I’m having a bit of trouble figuring out which character in F “looks like a dog” . . . maybe the third one, I guess, which is a bird.  A bird is also an animal, so it might seem that she is close, but that’s only if you think that birds look anything like dogs.  Do you?  Keep in mind that birds are more closely related to dinosaurs than they are to dogs, and if you take that into account, well, it’s just terrifying.  But Dragon finished strong, correctly picking out the middle book at the end of the list, and even using actual kanji knowledge–perhaps, one can imagine, gleaned from a previous KYPC encounter?–to solve the puzzle.  Bravo!

A. 秋　B. 夏　C. 春　D. 冬

Shirley produced a quite interesting treatise in response to this week’s challenge, which I have decided to title, “Seasons, Scandinavians, and Insanity.”  For those of you who did not get a chance to read it, the work discusses cavorting at length and also refers to a mysterious substance known as “glug,” the consensus opinion of which seems to be that while one can drink it, such consumption is not recommended.  It also teaches some foreign language, and isn’t that what we’re all about here?  “Skoll” means “Here’s to you, kid,” which I assume is rather different from, “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.”  By the way, the Japanese equivalent of “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid” is kimi no hitomi ni kanpai, which means roughly, “A toast to your eyes.”  Or, “A toast in your eyes.”  Particles can be confusing sometimes.

What’s that?  Answers?  What about answers?  I’m having fun here.

Oh, fine.

On the basis of general rowdiness, Shirley selected D as her eventual guess for summer.  This answer is correct . . . on opposite day.  D is winter, the time when all those Swedes–and possibly the occasional Japanese–are busy resting up so they can have enough energy to do all the things she mentions and hints at in her response.  A Fan is technically correct, I suppose, though if we were to uphold the spirit of competition, he settled on the same incorrect answer as Shirley.  But if we were to uphold the spirit of competition somewhat less stringently and allow second guesses, then he would be correct: B is summer.  In fact, the choices ended up going in reverse order: autumn, summer, spring, winter.

Here’s how you can remember them . . . at least if you know the meanings of some of the parts.  The right half of A means “fire”; in fall, the leaves turn the color(s) of fire.  The bottom part of B is the largest part of D, winter; summer crushes winter.  And then paper covers summer, and scissors cut paper.  The box at the bottom of C means “sun”; spring is when the sun comes out . . . except when it rains, which is all the time.  And finally, the two dots at the bottom of D also appear in the character meaning “cold”; winter is cold.  Though that doesn’t do you a lot of good unless you know that kanji.

I planned for that to make more sense in my head.

Anyway, it’s time to move on.  Speaking of moving on, the final movie in the Harry Potter series just came out, so millions of children (and childish adults) will have to come to grips with the fact that there will be no more, at least until Warner Bros. gets desperate and tries to crank out a prequel or something (I give it until about 2013).  So this week’s challenge is: identify the titles of the 7.5 Harry Potter books/movies.  Now, since every title comes in the form, “Harry Potter and the _____,” I won’t bother repeating the first part; you just get the blanks.  And just in case there’s someone out there who doesn’t know what goes in the blanks, your options are: Sorcerer’s/Philosopher’s Stone, Chamber of Secrets, Prisoner of Azkaban, Goblet of Fire, Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince, and Deathly Hallows.  Those less familiar with the books may feel free to consult other sources for inspiration, so long as these sources are not Japanese.

A. アズカバンの囚人　B. 賢者の石　C. 死の秘宝　D. 謎のプリンス

E. 秘密の部屋　F. 不死鳥の騎士団　G. 炎のゴブレット

I’m not going to repost all the characters here, because man, that takes up a lot of space.

I expected people to get creative with the kanji I suggested.  I did not expect them to go quite as far as Shirley did, but I guess when you’re on a roll you can’t really stop yourself.  She proposed a description of fireworks rather than a word for fireworks, but if we were to take all the characters she referenced and smash them together, it would look something like this:

明火翔空祭爆雷轟天花

And if you wanted to try to pronounce all that–which I wouldn’t recommend–it might come out something like meikashoukuusaibakuraigoutenka.  With any luck, the fireworks really are as loud as thunder, so no one will be able to hear you.

Dragon demonstrated a little more restraint, proposing this word:

翔天雷花

Which we could say as shoutenraika.

A Fan made use of components meaning sky, fire, explosion, and soar to create this:

空火爆翔

And I’ll say that’s kuukabakushou.

No one’s a loser this time around.  Shirley’s is a little hard to judge, but as for the other two, I think I prefer the combination of meanings in Dragon’s “Soaring Heaven Thunder Flower” and the hypothetical pronunciation of A Fan’s kuukabakushou (gotta love those hard K’s).

But it seems that Theoman was the only one familiar with the “correct” answer–at least, he certainly wants us to think so.  If he had contributed this week, then, he probably would have written this:

花火

This is the actual Japanese word for fireworks, or hanabi.

白赤黄緑青藍紫黒

And now for the part that actually has right and wrong answers.  Dragon technically got one right, I suppose, though I’m pretty sure she made up at least one of those so-called shades of red.  A Fan should really review his colors of the rainbow (remember Roy G. Biv!), because, as a matter of fact, the colors are listed in that order, except that there is no kanji for the color orange and they are bookended by white on the left and black on the right.  This means that Shirley very nearly got them all right, correctly identifying white and simply reversing red and blue.  Her reference to “a lot of stuff” might suggest that she meant to write “sixth” instead of “fifth,” but here at KYPC we’re always . . . well, almost always willing to give people the benefit of the doubt.

Here’s an easy one for next week; you’ve got a one-in-four shot.  See if you can pick out summer from this list of the four seasons.

A. 秋　B. 夏　C. 春　D. 冬

A. 佐藤　B. 鈴木　C. 高橋　D. 田中　E. 渡辺

Shakespeare himself proposed the idea that family names really aren’t that important–though the eventual outcome of Romeo and Juliet strongly suggests otherwise– but let’s take a look at a few anyway.

Theoman quickly recognized D as Tanaka, a name meaning “middle of the rice field.”  It is common, yes, but not the most common; Tanaka ranks 4th.

Famous person named Tanaka: Tiger Tanaka, James Bond’s ally in You Only Live Twice

A Fan promptly rattled off a list of his favorite Japanese companies and ball-bumbling, light-hitting infielders.  Most of them are, in fact, actual family names (Nintendo is not), and one of them even appears on this list, though not in the order he identified it: B is Suzuki, which means “bell tree.”  It is the second most common family name in Japan.

Famous person named Suzuki: Ichiro Suzuki, who is so famous he doesn’t even need a family name (also: Kissy Suzuki, one of the only Bond girls to die a natural death, also from You Only Live Twice)

Shirley went to opposite ends of the spectrum, looking for both a hero and a villain, but neither actually ended up being on the list.  The second character in A is indeed daunting, but you’d better get used to writing it, because it’s part of the most common family name in Japan: Sato.  The characters literally mean something like “helper wisteria,” though the second character could refer to the Fujiwara, an extremely prominent political family in Japan’s classical period.

Famous person named Sato: Gordon Hisashi Sato, the cell biologist who discovered that polypeptide factors required for the culture of mammalian cells outside the body are also important regulators of differentiated cell functions and of utility in culture of new types of cells for use in research and biotechnology, whatever the heck that means.

And now for the rest.  I know A Fan, at least, will be kicking himself for not trying this, but the names ended up being ordered in sequence: A, Sato, is the most common; B, Suzuki, is second; C, Takahashi, is third.  Takahashi means “high bridge.”

Famous person named Takahashi: Takahashi Rumiko, the wealthiest manga artist in Japan and creator of Ranma 1/2 and InuYasha, among others

Last (out of the top five, at least) is E, Watanabe, which means something like “border crossing.”

Famous person named Watanabe: Ken Watanabe, star of Letters from Iwo Jima and featured in The Last Samurai, Batman Begins, and Inception

No one won this time, so this week I thought I would give you something a little bit more fun to do.  Rather than simply guessing words, you will be making words.  In honor of the holiday, try your hand at creating a word for “fireworks.”  Feel free to use any of the following kanji (or, if you are so inclined, any others you might know):

空

meaning “sky”

天

also meaning “sky,” but often with a somewhat more grandiose significance; “the heavens”

爆

meaning “explosion”

火

meaning “fire”

雷

meaning “thunder”

轟

meaning “to roar; to resound”

花

meaning “flower”

明

meaning “bright”

祭

meaning “festival”

翔

meaning “to soar”

Points will be awarded for creativity, explanations, and, I suppose, accuracy.  I won’t tell you how many characters are in the “correct” answer, but I will say that compounds of 2 or 4 characters are much more common than those of other amounts.

Finally, as a bonus, pick out the red, white, and blue from this lineup of colors:

白赤黄緑青藍紫黒

A. 映画館　B. 教会　C. 大使館　D. 図書館　E. 病院　F. 郵便局

And we’re back.  As usual, I will refrain from asking whether a week without kanji was a disappointment or a relief.

Theoman seems to have the most expertise here, so if you’re lost in Japan, I would recommend giving him the map.  On the other hand, his process-of-elimination style of navigation could be rather nerve-wracking.  I don’t know about you, but if my tour guide said, “Well, I don’t know what this sign means, and I don’t know the word for ’embassy,’ so this must be the embassy,” I would strongly consider parting ways.  Sure, it could be the embassy . . . but it could also be an abattoir, a pawn shop, or the local Legitimate Businessman’s Social Club.  In this case, however, he is correct.  C is the embassy.  Congratulations!  You are safe on U.S. soil.  Unless of course, he has managed to accidentally lead you to the Venezuelan Embassy.

Dragon, on the other hand, should have the map kept away from her at all costs.  To be fair, if you’re looking for a hospital, the embassy is probably a better place to go than, say, the library or the post office–and hopefully you’re not lost for so long that you need a church–but I, personally, would rather go to the hospital.  It’s right there at E, see?  With the characters meaning “sickness” and “institution”?

Also, if Dragon would like to make sure that she really has seen Chariots of Fire, she can go to A, the movie theater.

Shirley got a nice lead-off hit by identifying B as the church, though the second character actually refers to meeting or coming together rather than symbolizing a pagoda.  And she was close on D, which is not the movie theater but a much older version of the movie theater, which we used to call a library.  We will hope there is no meaning in the fact that she finds herself drawn to the hospital and instead praise the second correct process-of-elimination guess this week: F is the post office.

For this week’s puzzle we will do something a little different.  Listed below are the five most common surnames in Japan today.  It is often said that in the U.S., while there are a relatively small number of frequently used given names, there is near infinite variety in surnames.  In East Asia the situation tends to be the reverse, and while it is much more true in China and Korea, Japan also has a relatively limited number of very common surnames and a wider variety of given names.  Anyway, this puzzle will be a little different because there are several different things you can do.  You can choose to order the names from most popular to least popular, based on which ones you like better or whatever bizarre methods you usually employ for KYPC.  On the other hand, you can try to guess how they are pronounced, as chances are you may have heard of at least one famous person that has each of these names (those with actual knowledge of how kanji are pronounced are discouraged from choosing this option).  Finally, you can attempt to guess what the names mean.

A. 佐藤　B. 鈴木　C. 高橋　D. 田中　E. 渡辺

A. 戦場にかける橋　B. 波止場　C. 羊たちの沈黙　D. 普通の人々

E. 許されざる者　F. 夜の大捜査線

A Fan feels strongly about his movies and somewhat less strongly about the sanctity of the Academy’s Best Picture award.  He should perhaps have saved some of his second batch of guesses, though, as I reserve the right to present a “Should’ve Been Best Picture” puzzle at some later date.  I like to think that none of the ones I put up were too terrible, and this hope is somewhat backed up by the fact that none of his first batch of guesses can be found on this list.  I feel like I should give him something, though, so I will say that he was closest on D, which is Ordinary People.  It certainly sounds boring, anyway.

Theoman gave me the benefit of the doubt in terms of taste, but unfortunately it didn’t pay off.  His kanji knowledge, which had served him quite well the past few weeks, failed him, and his “one” sailed far over the cuckoo’s nest, missing the list entirely.  We’ll give him partial credit for getting the right number of words in A, and, in fact, they both have the same fourth word.  The word is “the.”

We at the Wordsman are rather distressed to learn that Dragon has never seen Chariots of Fire, The Sting, or either of the good parts of the Godfather trilogy.  She is an expert on Gandhi, though, which allowed her to figure out that it is not on this list.  Unfortunately, Lawrence of Arabia is not either.  C is Silence of the Lambs–a good movie, but one which, unlike some of the others she missed, it may be forgivable to pass over.

So at this point you’re probably thinking that no one got anything correct this week.  And you would be absolutely . . . WRONG!  Shirley decided to put together a list that was basically the opposite of A Fan’s, and she struck paydirt straight off the bat: A is The Bridge on the River Kwai, though the Japanese title is the somewhat less specific “Bridge on the Battlefield.”  None of the rest of her guesses was correct, but hey, the way everybody else was swinging, one out of six ain’t half bad.  And she even identified another picture that appeared on the list: On the Waterfront (or, in Japanese, simply “Waterfront”) is B, not F.

Finally, at E, we have Unforgiven.  And F?  Well, you wanna know what they call me?  They call me Mister Wordsman.  And if you can’t figure it out from that, it’s your own fault.

But let’s do something a little less complicated this week.  I’m going to pull a challenge pretty much straight from my old first-year Japanese textbook, and we’re going to try to identify types of buildings.  If you can’t stop thinking about your favorite films after last week’s challenge, you can look for the movie theater.  If you prefer something a little more old-fashioned, check out the library.  In case of emergencies, look for the hospital, and in case it’s, uh, Sunday, try to find the church.  The post office is there too, and so is the embassy, because if you’re in another country, it sure can’t hurt to know where that is.

A. 映画館　B. 教会　C. 大使館　D. 図書館　E. 病院　F. 郵便局

NOTE: I will be somewhat busy next weekend, and I have the sneaking suspicion that the vast majority of my readership will as well, so there will likely not be a KYPC update next Monday.

A. オペラ座の怪人　B. 猫　C. 美女と野獣　D. 惨め者達　E. 家賃

F. 屋根の上のバイオリン弾き

Not quite enough answers this week to stage a full musical, but we might be able to put together one of those quirky off-Broadway shows.

To the tune of “Gaston”:

When I was a lad I took Japanese class every spring, summer, winter and fall
And in those classes we learned katakana, so I basic’lly can read them ALLLLLLLLLL!

We at the Wandering Wordsman have ruled that looking up the list is not cheating, which is lucky for you, as we are bound to pursue any criminal to the ends of the earth, like the relentless Javert.  Presumably the list helped Theoman pick out #8 on the long-run list, Beauty and the Beast, as letter C, while he was busy scorning A and F.  But was he telling the truth or merely bluffing when he claimed to be able to identify B as #2, Cats?  I guess we’ll never know.  We will also leave it up to the world to wonder whether you got it because you saw the character for “woman” or because you realized it was the only one on the list to come in the form “_____ and _____”

To the tune of “Master of the House”:

Master of the site
Tripping up the folks
Puzzling their minds and telling awful jokes
Setting up his traps
Laying out the bait
Mocking their misfortune when they can’t think straight

We agree with Shirley that F is certainly long enough to deserve to be Les Mis, but unfortunately it is not.  Here we have #14, Fiddler on the Roof.  This is one of the three that actually uses what I wrote as its Japanese title; the others are C and A, the unstoppable Phantom.  Those miserable ones are hiding over at D, trying to stay away from the misguided revolutions, racist forced relocations and angry mobs that are running rampant through this puzzle (and you thought Chicago was bad!)  Next to them, and not much better off, E represents the struggles of the poverty-stricken to get enough together to pay the Rent.

By the way, last week’s bonus answer was: Memorial Day->”Memory”->Cats->Musicals

I rather liked that puzzle idea, but I’m guessing you won’t be too happy about having to do musicals two weeks in a row, so we’re modifying the topic slightly.  This time around it’s Best Picture Winners.  Every movie on the following list has won an Academy Award for Best Picture, and, unlike last week, everything listed here actually goes by this title in Japan.  I know that’s a lot of choices, so I’ll narrow it down for you a little: none of the choices is from the past fifteen years, and none are more than sixty years old.

A. 戦場にかける橋　B. 波止場　C. 羊たちの沈黙　D. 普通の人々

E. 許されざる者　F. 夜の大捜査線

A. 蛙の子は蛙　B. 虎穴に入らずんば虎児を得ず

C. 三人寄れば文殊の知恵　D. 船頭多くして船山に登る

E. 覆水盆に返らず

“Not even the wisest can see all ends.”

Not a proverb, exactly, but hopefully it’s some comfort to the weekly KYPC sufferers . . . I mean, contestants.

What do you look for in a proverb?  Theoman likes ’em short and sweet, preferably of the “X=Y” variety.  This must be why he went for A, and his instincts did not lead him astray.  “The child of a frog is a frog,” or, as we like to say, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

A Fan, on the other hand, seems to think that the most important aspect of a proverb is that it be in another language, which means that he would probably do well to learn a few of these.  “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” is certainly true, but it can’t be found on this list.  Neither can “A good beer is a good friend.”  The graduate student’s motto, “To learn is to suffer,” is not located at E, but its cousin can be seen up there at B: “If you don’t go into the tiger’s lair, you won’t get a tiger cub.”  Why you would want to get a tiger cub is left up to the imagination, I suppose.  And it looks like he picked up on A, too.  Guess that one’s pretty easy to recognize across language barriers.

Leaving aside the issue of whether or not Shirley has a grudge against members of the legal profession, I think it would be best for everyone to calm down a little about E.  After all, there’s no use crying over spilt milk, or, to put it another way, spilt water won’t go back in the tray.  Maybe if you put it in a cup or something instead, it wouldn’t have spilled in the first place, but I guess that’s all water under the bridge now.  She also cites another proverb with a lot of applicability for graduate students, most of whom would be rather distressed to learn that “Money can’t buy happiness” isn’t actually true.  In fact, there seem to be a lot of proverbs that she feels miss the mark; perhaps they were put into production without sufficient prior consultation.  Maybe they should have had more people think about these things first, falling back on C, “Two heads are better than one,” or, “When three people come together, they have the wisdom of Manjusri.”  I suppose I can’t blame you guys for not getting one that involves Buddhism.

Dragon thought D looks painful.  And it is, but not because it represents “No pain, no gain.”  D is the Japanese equivalent of “Too many cooks spoil the broth,” but its literal meaning implies rather more drastic consequences than simply having to eat a subpar meal: “Too many captains will steer the ship up a mountain.”  Ouch!

And now it’s time for a little song and dance number.  This week we’re going to be looking at musicals.  Now, for a lot of Broadway musicals, the Japanese equivalent title is not a translation but a transliteration: Cats is Kyattsu, Rent is Rento, etc.  It’s not like we don’t do this in English, too: last time I checked, Les Misérables wasn’t English.  But that didn’t sound like a lot of fun to me, so I decided to render them by their meanings rather than by their sounds.  Half of the shows on this list, though, are given as they typically would be in Japanese.  All of them are from the list of Top 20 Longest Running Broadway Shows of All Time.  Those who can read katakana could choose to show off by identifying the easy ones, but I think it would be more fun to challenge yourself and try something harder.

A. オペラ座の怪人　B. 猫　C. 美女と野獣　D. 惨め者達　E. 家賃

F. 屋根の上のバイオリン弾き

And, finally, bonus points to anyone who can guess the somewhat convoluted string of associations that explains why this challenge is appearing today, of all days.

A. 嬉　B. 怒　C. 恐　D. 悲　E. 退屈　F. 恥

Time to see just how in touch with your emotions you really are.

Theoman presented an interesting theory of emotion based on happiness, sadness, and anger.  I thought that the elemental emotional states were sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic, but I guess I’m just old-fashioned.  He cleverly spotted the same “element” in B, C, and D (and, if you look carefully, it’s over there in F, too, stretched out tallways).  For the most part, his basic emotions matched up with this set; unfortunately, his choice of order was poor.  In fact it’s B that’s anger, and D that’s sadness.  He can be sad and angry about that, I guess.  He also missed C, fear, which is a pretty primal emotion if you ask me.

A Fan also failed to record a correct answer, though he gets eclecticity points for managing to reference both Men in Black and A Charlie Brown Christmas in the same post.  He also gets sympathy points for misspelling “embarrass” the same way I always misspell “embarrass.”  It’s nothing to be ashamed of.  Or embarrassed about.  In other words, no cause for F.

Shirley continued her roll, knocking off B, anger, right away.  She also spotted boredom at E (apparently she was not as enthralled by the Bug in Men in Black as A Fan was).  And she even gets a half-point bonus for recognizing that A is not sad.

And apparently if you scare a Dragon its hairs stand on end.  I didn’t even know dragons had hair.

The misfit of the week is A, happiness.  I could make some sort of comment about how you all chose to focus on the negative emotions (except Theoman), but I suppose most of the blame is mine for including only one positive emotion in the list.  It’s hard to stay happy when you’re surrounded by boredom, fear, and anger.  But now you all know how to get to your happy place.

But helping people be properly emotionally adjusted is not my only goal here on KYPC.  I also like to dispense wisdom.  In this case, it’s wisdom of the obvious, trite variety.  That’s right, this week we’re going to learn some proverbs!  Don’t worry–these are all tidbits of wisdom you should be familiar with.  That is, you should be familiar with their figurative meanings.  Someone out there with more familiarity with Japanese could, if he was feeling adventurous, take a stab at their literal meanings as well.  Hey, No Pain, No Gain, right?  And if you miss, it’s all okay: There’s No Use Crying Over Spilt Milk.  Now, once again, I must remind participants not to collaborate on answers.  No matter how much you may think that Two Heads Are Better Than One, in fact this is a case of Too Many Cooks Spoil The Broth.

Is this challenge too difficult?  Is it borderline harassment?  Am I, as I have so often been accused of, simply being sadistic?  Well, let’s just say that The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From The Tree.

A. 蛙の子は蛙　B. 虎穴に入らずんば虎児を得ず

C. 三人寄れば文殊の知恵　D. 船頭多くして船山に登る

E. 覆水盆に返らず