Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
Apart from a few Action Man and Star Wars figures I had when I was a kid, I’m not really into dolls. However, there’s a website called The Doll Palace which has a new section that should appeal to parents. The new Coloring Pages section has a wonderful choice of ready-made, black and white drawings. All you have to do is choose one, use the color palette to add bright, […]
I just learned from my wife that she has sent off a request for a free Disney English System sample DVD. It’s widely accepted that if you want your child to be proficient in a foreign language, then you should start their learning from a young age. The last decade has seen Japan’s “English conversation” schools fall over themselves trying to recruit students at a younger and younger age. For […]
The new advertising medium is blogging. Companies and individuals alike are increasingly taking advantage of blogs to promote their products and websites to audiences in highly targeted niches. For example, somebody with their own blog about raising children in Japan, or a language school looking to recruit teachers, might want to get a special mention on LongCountdown.com because these are topics that I blog about. In the last year, the […]
On May 29th, Japanese Mori Riyo was crowned Miss Universe, the first winner from Japan since 1959. While Mori is most definitely beautiful, I can’t help but feel that she’s not the most beautiful woman in the world (my mum is!) , and it seems most people share my view. Even the bookies gave her only a 150-1 chance of winning. Although I still see Miss Universe as a beauty […]
With the launch of The News Room, I can now get paid to embed news stories, including video, into this blog. So, the first thing I looked for was a story related to Japan. On my first search I found this fascinating video about “styrofoam homes of the future”. It seems that a Japanese company in Fukushima is building dome-shaped vacation homes. Apparently they’re among the most energy efficient houses […]
This evening, we ordered a pizza to celebrate my wife’s last day of work. I’m not so sure she should be eating pizza, but I guess she’s got two mouths to feed. Mami only worked at the hospital for a year, but it felt like much longer. Rarely a day went by wihtout her coming home three hours late, absolutely exhausted. You hear stories all the time of Japanese people […]
I’ve had a busy evening changing over from the ready-made template on LongCountdown to one of my own custom designs, which you may have seen on my other blog, Nice4Rice. I hope you like the new look. It’s all part of sprucing up the blog for the birth of little Rikuto at the end of July. I’ve been slack of late with writing new blog entries. I think I’m suffering […]
In my last post, Double without you, I talked about how the Japanese may need to go back to basics and re-learn English from simple ABCs. What they lack in English skills however, you would think they’d make up for in mathematics, right? Well, I’m not so sure… When you walk around the backstreets of Japan’s sprawling cities, you’ll see bars and restaurants with opening hours displayed in their windows […]