Proper Tea!

Friday, I woke up with a headache and stuffed sinuses, so I called in sick and got a few more hours of sleep. It hasn't seemed to help, but I'm surviving. I feel constantly exhausted and ready to fall asleep.

The tea party.
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But that's not what I want to write about. As a rite of passage for the kids who are in the afternoon program at Kouryou-chan's school, the school hosts a tea party, and the children get to do the service. Kouryou-chan has been talking about this for days, so much so that I think her sister was getting tired of hearing about it. It was proper tea, black, with sugar and cream, and Kouryou-chan and her classmates got to hand out biscuits and finger sandwiches of peanutbutter & honey and cucumbers & cream cheese.

Candace

Kouryou-chan's teacher, Candace
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, Kouryou-chan's teacher, led us through a brief ritual of thankfulness, very non-denominational and inoffensive as anything, and then we sat around and talked with the other children and their parents. Omaha shushed me when I commented that proper tea was an expression of British Imperial Power: tea from India, sugar from the West Indies. I like Candace a lot; she's always on in that amazing way. Pre-school teachers are clearly born, not made.

Later, when I was home, my Mom called and

Kouryou-chan on the phone.
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Kouryou-chan got to speak with her. She said she was doing well and wants me to email her the photograph you see there, which I think is kinda scary because it's the classic "I'm on the phone" pose which I'm sure she'll be affecting all through high school if she's not perpetually IM'ing her friends on some portable thing anyway.

Anyway, I'm gonna go take a nap.

MST3K Friday

Did you ever have that feeling that you've seen something on MST3K before, when you were young, as a legitimate flick? I had that distinct impression while watching The Magic Voyage of Sinbad, a bizarre Russian fairy-tale about a minstrel and his magic harp. He returns to his home city to discover that the merchants have gotten richer and the poor poorer, and he undertakes a series of strange challenges to win the merchant's cash from them. As fallenpegasus pointed out, he turned the town's capital into mere cash, and when his second magical challenge comes he then throws more gold into the town's economy without a corresponding increase in captial. It was full of Marxist rhetoric, so I feel it was fine of me to critize the bad economics.

The film was original titled Sadko, but the Americanization of it was retouched to avoid any Russian names because it was made during the McCarthy era. Scarily enough, the American translation was done by Francis Ford Coppola, then 22 years old. The bad translation led to comments like, "Wow, Sinbad is really Nordic!" and "I haven't seen anything vaguely Arabic yet."