Today I'd like to talk about Playboy magazine...

(Sigh) It was bound to happen eventually - I knew that being a smart arse in class would work against me, and so it has. I had my second Japanese language class today, and we've been told that each of us have to find an article from a newspaper and give a 15-min presentation on it. I made a throwaway comment that that sounds like a fantastic idea, but a combination of my voice being slightly too loud, other people speaking slightly too softly, together with the fact that sarcasm just does not translate into Japanese, resulted in me being the prime candidate for the first speaker for the next class...DAMMIT!!

So what do I do? I make the suggestion that we 'draw straws' to determine the order of the speakers - normally, this ploy would not have been successful, but for the fact that not 5 minutes earlier, the teacher had taught us the Japanese for 'to draw straws'. It was pure genius! A master stroke! In one swoop, I had managed to use a Japanese verb the teacher had just taught, deflect a homework assignment for next class, and postpone it until a later date (which fits nicely into my habit to procrastinate). So the teacher shuffles off to get the straws (actually, they're strips of paper with numbers on them), and comes back where we each draw one. Other people were grimacing as they looked at their numbers, and I was chuckling to myself, mentally patting myself on the back..."job well done, Kallun!". I pick my strip of paper, turn it over, and it's a capital 'D'... or maybe a lower case 'e'... I couldn't work out what it was. Until it dawned on me that it was a 1 in a circle...#%$''(&('#!('%'&"#?" !!! Internally, the expletives were many and plenty, on the outside, I smiled, winked and said I was fine with it! DAMMIT!

I have therefore decided that instead of some boring article from the Japan Economic Newspaper or some other dull piece, I'm going to present an article from Playboy...I only read it for the articles, so it'll work out well. I'll see if I can come come up with an interactive component for my presentation...