The tale of two keitais

So this past week was Golden Week, which meant a couple 4-day weekends for yours truly. I took the opportunity to take a trip up to my old stomping grounds in Miyagi, which was definitely relaxing and enjoyable.

The only caveat - I had to say goodbye to something that has been near and dear to me for the past year or so, my cell phone, taking with it all the numbers accumulated in it over the past year. Pictured on the right are the culprit (right) and its replacement, with a new buddy tagging along known as marimokkori, the Sendai version. I call him Date Mokkori since it's the marimokkori of Date Masamune of Sendai fame.

So what is this marimokkori exactly you ask? Well I'm glad you did, because you know I'm going to tell you anyway as they exude more awesomeness than a platypus's mammary glands. Marimokkori is this cute (apparently) green toy that originated up in Hokkaido. Marimo is a kind of algae they have up in Hokkaido, and mokkori is another name for... a crotch! As you may notice from his likeness to the left, mari is always rather proud of his bulging mokkori. I used to have a mokkori monkey as my keitai strap for a while actually, but I lost him. I guess monkeys are meant to be free.

Oh, and if you're wondering how my phone died it was rather abrupt and with no warning, but I do have an idea what might have happened... it was shortly following this incident that I noticed it died:



Totally, totally random. Ah well, this time around I got one with a SIM card and a memory card. Backups people!

Stuff you always wanted to know (but were never bored enough to look up)

Hey, look what woke me up last night about 1:30 in the morning!

Ok, so let's talk about platypuses, as apparently my spell checker is telling me that platypi is not correct as I originally had thought. However, a little Wiki tells me that the "pseudo-Latin" platypi is the colloquial form, and that it would be platypodes if put into Greek as the singular form is. Anyway maybe I'm alone on this one, but I think they're cool.

So in a sometimes futile effort to stave off boredom at work when things are slow, I run across some rather interesting (to me) things in my random net meanderings.... today's stop by the good 'ol BBC got me looking into our nice and cuddley duck-billed monotrematic buddies, and oh my GOD you would not believe the fountain of trivial knowledge that I stumbled upon - this to me was like stumbling across the El Dorado of Wikipedia entries. For instance, did you know that a baby platypus is referred to as a puggle? Or that the males have poisonous hind legs and the powers of electroreception? Or that while as members of the mammal family they do have mammary glands and lactate, they don't have nipples? Seriously, I couldn't make this stuff up... no wonder people thought these things were a hoax when they first discovered them.

So did I stop there? Of course not, because in explaining what I was looking at to the girl sitting next to me at work I found out that platypus in Japanese is カモノハシ ("kamonohasi"), which as I see it pretty directly translates to "duck-nosed". Makes sense. And the only other monotreme (単孔類, "tankourui") currently in existence is the echidna (ハリモグラ, "harimogura").

This means that I can now say things like

"単孔類の生き残りのたった二種、カモノハシとハリモグラは、哺乳類の一部である一方、卵を産むし乳首がない。"
(While the only two remaining monotremes, the platypus and echidna, are part of the mammal family, they lay eggs and don't have nipples.)

I guarantee that this knowledge is coming soon to a conversation near you! Man, I am sooo gonna be the life of the party tomorrow night. ;P