I got the most elaborate haircut of my life today. The barber on campus is this great guy who does an amazing job using primarily just scissors. He toyed with my hair for about three seconds and guessed correctly how long it had been since I'd gotten a haircut - whoa. It was like my head was a bunch of tea leaves at the bottom of his cup and I was a group of middle-aged housewives paying him $100 an hour for his divinations. The haircut itself was pretty cool, as he took his time and did a great job. But then I decided to add a shave, and he kicked it up about ten notches. I'd never been shaved by anyone else before, and it was a pretty cool experience. The actual process of the shave was far too complicated to explain in detail, but suffice to say that it took about ten to fifteen minutes and involved one of those cool old-style shaving brushes, a real straight razor, countless hot towels, shaving my forehead, and all sorts of other craziness. The long and short of it is that I think that I got new eyebrows somewhere in there, because the ones I left the shop with were not the same as the ones that preceded me in. Pictured to the right are my new eyebrows for all the world to see. All in all, it was a great experience and only cost me about $17. The shave was only about $2, so I'm basically never going to shave myself again.
Bryan, would you give me your contact info? Same goes for Scott, as I think I lost your e-mail. I don't have any way of talking to you except this. Incidentally, thanks to Bryan for correcting the spelling of "Amaterasu."
Although between "kanjification," "what does it work," and "syllabogram," Ethan's requests for an explanation of the kanji name system hardly deserve to be dignified with a response, nonetheless I shall pretend that he asked the question in fine English and respond appropriately. Here's how "kanjification" works:
First, to understand a little bit about kanji - it is completely non-phonetic, but each character has a few readings assigned to it dating back from when the Japanese first took the characters from Chinese. Each character also has a general meaning that can be combined with the meanings of other characters to get a word or phrase. Also keep in mind that a single syllable can be written with any number of different characters - "san," for instance, can be written with at least twenty different characters, all of which have different meanings.
Thus, to create a kanji name, I first transliterate the English name into Japanese, which primarily consists of breaking up consonant clusters and replacing unpronouncable sounds. Then I take each syllable and search through the kanji that can be used to write that syllable and choose the most interesting. To create the whole name, I just find the most interesting combinations.
This is not necessarily the way that Japanese do it, but I know that they use this method at least sometimes. There is also a more complicated way that involves complete mastery of Japanese - it uses the same system, but takes advantage of the fact that most characters have additional readings if they are used in names. These additional readings have no rhyme or reason to them and are incredibly difficult to learn, so I won't be doing that for a while. I hope that explains what it does work.
I have yet to work up the nerve to buy a whole fish, complete with eyes and all that, but they pack the fish section of every grocery store. Nothing says appetizing like eyes!
