Omaha's birthday party

Well, last night, I threw a surprise birthday party for Omaha. I had been planning this for two weeks, complete with invitations to a whole bunch of people-- and I'm still kicking myself for not doing the bovious and looking at Omaha's friend's list for more. Still, we had about a dozen people show up, and that was great; the house is big in some ways, but for entertaining having more than twelve to fifteen would have been too many.

My co-conspirator, fallenpegasus, showed up around five obstensibly to watch over Kouryou-chan while I took Omaha out to a birthday dinner. And after we went out to the fancy and expensive Home Port restaurant at the local yacht club where we talked for a while, ate some moderately good food (the trout was okay, the Mahi-Mahi delecious, the crab cakes astounding), and then I took her home.

Now, despite being with her for seventeen years, I'm terrible at her birthdays. I'm terrible at birthdays in general and have no confidence at all in setting anything special up for one. I kinda faked it through with Kouryou-chan's last, but I wanted it to be special for Omaha. Now, Omaha knows just how bad I am, so she figured that nothing special would be happening tonight, so when we drove up and she saw all of the cars in front of our house she was a little surprised. "What are all these cars?" she said.

"I think your friends have shown up for your birthday party."

She came in, a little surprised, and immediately settled in for hugs and greetings and all. Kouryou-chan and Pegasus had done a good job of following the instructions I had left in an envelope: warm the brie, take the chilled wines out of the cooler hidden in plain sight out on the deck, put out the reds hidden behind the comic books downstairs, send folks out to the grocery store across the street and the ice cream shop a mile up the road and fetch her cake and some nibblies. He also put my laptop next to the stereo and plugged them in; I had it set up to play 140 "dinosaur rock" pieces from Omaha's musical era of affection: "I Wear My Sunglasses At Night," "Lawyers, Guns & Money," "Stayin' Alive," and so forth.

I made her candles with her birthday in binary, which most people grokked immediately, and we all sang happy birthday. Later, after Kouryou-chan went to bed, Jenkitty, Kendaer, Pegasus and I all played a round of Xxxenophile. I'm so grateful to all of you: Technoshaman, Tabbifli, Ivolucien, Jenner, Desirae, and the those I've already mentioned for making the evening so worthwhile. Thank you all.

[Wine] A few different ones...

Well, as I mentioned last night, we're all grown up now and can buy wines and drink them without bingeing, so I had a few at the party last night.

Rosemont Estate's Traminer/Reisling blend, 2003. This was the hit of the party, and I should have bought two because it disappeared so quickly. Properly chilled to near-freezing as all whites should be, it was wonderful, fruity and drinkable and refreshing as well. Pleasant aftertaste, too.

Lennard's Crossing Syrah, 2003: A warm red, rich and interesting, a classic Australian flavor bomb with a full blackberry compliment and wonderful mouthfeel that lingered for a while.

Smoking Loon Cabernet Sauvignon, 2002: I'm not as familiar with Cab-Sauvs as I should be, but I enjoyed this wine. It was much drier than the Syrah, naturally, and more complicated. It didn't have an aftertaste worth noting either way.

Domaine Ste. Michelle Blanc de Blanc champagne. Very dry, not to mine or Omaha's tastes, but as a gesture, a champagne nonetheless. No real comments on it.

And finally, Charles Shaw's Sauvignon Blanc. I'd heard a lot about "two buck Chuck," as it's known when it's sold through Trader Joe's, but, y'know, it's a terrible wine. It starts off fine but it has a thin, reedy, unpleasant aftertaste that just doesn't work. Nobody drank it. The word of the evening for it was disappointing. It's going into the wine cabinet to be used in pilafs and risottos, and that's about it.

[Anime] [Meta] Raws and Otaku

I have recently begun to notice an interesting phenomenon on the anime boards. You can see an example of the most popular ones at Download Anime. Notice all the ones that say raw? They don't have the download numbers of the most popular fansubs but if you look at them, there are still a large number of Americans downloading and watching anime shows with no fansubbing at all on them.

I have, several times, mentioned my own technique for getting up to speed on spoken Japanese, which involves owning an IPod or a clone (I use an old Archos Jukebox, about $120 off Ebay) and buying or borrowing from the library the Pimsleur Speak & Learn Japanese classes, all 93 lessons, and sticking with them. To supplement those, I watch a lot of anime and listen to a lot of jpop, and slowly I'm using the subtitles less and less.

I don't think I'm the only one. The availability of a massive amount of Japanese-language material, the ease with which some very high-quality language learning packages can be bought, and the portability of a high-resolution learning environment have led to an entire generation of Americans who can and probably will teach themselves a foreign language in two years or less.

There's plenty of precedence for this. After all, there are millions of people around the world who learned to speak English watching subtitled Hollywood movies; it is a tradition as old as Hollywood itself. I just find it interesting that it should come on so suddenly, and with such demand. The raws used to be an obscure corner of the fansubbing community; now they're just as available and as displayed as the fansubs.

For me, there's a bit of a disappointment in seeing this. Even if I was an early adopter of the whole anime language learning technique, it means that there'll be others capable of competing with me if I ever try and sell my skills to an employer. I was kinda hoping to have the field as a translator and quality assurance manager of web-based appliance interfaces to myself, but I probably won't be.