Classy and Jazzy

Things around here have been both uneventful and fairly busy at the same time. This is making it somewhat difficult to decide what to write about here, which usually means that I am about to writing a fairly rambling post.

In any event, it's December over here (much as I assume it is elsewhere in the world). This means it's getting close to Christmas time, the run-up to which has been accompanied by the usual over exposure to Santa imagery, evergreens, poinsettias, etc. Of course, this being a non-Christian country, everything is slightly skewed - which I find generally fantastic. We have the ubiquitous "Happy Merry Christmas" signs, Christmas trees made entirely from tinsel and/or bows, random objects decorated as presents, and on and on. I'm also continually amused at the Christmas cake and Kentucky Fried Chicken ads that surround me and let me know that Christmas is for lovers. But what I really find fascinating is the constant Christmas music, which is refreshingly free of words and fairly uniformly upbeat (imagine Silent Night is a version that sounds like Dave Brubeck filtered through the Peanuts cartoons). In addtion, lacking any connection to Christianity, the tunes that dominate are those that are free of Christian imagery. This is doubly refreshing: Christmas music without the words and without the Jesus, marvelous! But then I started to notice that one song inexplicably dominates the selections that serenade one in the malls, cafe's, etc. (seriously, I hear this song at least 4 times an hour when we are outside of house) In fact, I was fairly startled the first time I realized what the song was, and have been consistently re-startled each time I hear it, especially because it seems like such an idiosyncratic choice. I'm trying to build up some suspense here, though I'm not sure how well it's working, so I'll just post a video of the song in a version that is one of the few that I've heard here with the words intact. 

Curiously, the fact of hearing the Jackson 5 sing this song here is not in itself that surprising, given the general obsession here with MJ that doesn't show any signs of abating. 

Some of the other things that have been going on include:

North Korea - they put a rocket into space yesterday. We were just having coffee on the couch when I saw a tweet about it and turned on the TV to see every station reporting on NK's boneheaded actions. 

Earthquake - a fairly big earthquake occured on Friday close to the location of 2011's big earthquake up in Miyagi prefecture. Again, media coverage was pretty intense but the danger was over quickly and was confined to a small area with relatively small tsunamis. 

Cavaquinho - an instrument I've been borrowing from one of the samba bateria members. I've been thinking about picking up a small string instrument lately (on the order of a ukulele). After samba practice on Sunday, however, I was expressing my frustration with having played 4 hours of shaker and my desire to do more melodic and familiar things. This prompted the borrowing of said instrument, which has been an awesome experience so far (finger callouses are progressing apace...)

Nabe - that's all really. We've been eating a lot of it. It's a magical food. 

Anyway, this only touches on a little bit of what we've been doing (I'll leave Rachel to blog about the other stuff) and we have a lot of other things coming up: Belgian beer tonight (for my birthday), Kobe Luminarie (ルミナリエ), and trips to Nagoya and Tokyo. 

I'll leave you with more music. This time from the ubiquitous Celine Dion (should start at 1:18).