ネイティブが教える英会話のジェムスクール☆Teachers☆

In what is now Lebanon, there is an old Phoenician city originally called Gubla. The Greeks who went there to trade pronounced it 'Bubla' and eventually started calling it 'Byblos'. This was the place where Egyptians would sell papyrus to the Greeks, and so biblio became the Greek work for a scroll or book.

In English, the words Bible (a collection of sacred books), bibliography (a list of referenced books), and bibliophile (a person who loves books), all come from that Greek word. In most European languages, some variant of bibliotek is the word for library. ¿Donde está la biblioteca? ("Where is the library?") is one of the first sentences Americans learn when they start learning Spanish.

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If you've ever watched American football, you may have noticed the players' faces marked with black paint under their eyes.

This is called "eye black" and it's used to reduce glare from the sun. One of the first people to use it in sports was Babe Ruth.

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One of the most iconic tropes of steampunk media is airships, and especially airship pirates!

The interesting thing is, an airship pirate battle actually happened! In 1917, a Norwegian ship was captured by German pirates flying a zeppelin!

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Have you seen Toy Story 4? I haven't. I loved the first three, but I don't care about seeing any more.




It amazes me how much computer animation has developed over the years. Not only has the quality of the graphics improved, but the process of making them has changed.

I recently learned that in Toy Story 4, instead of human artists drawing individual spider webs, they programmed AI spiders to create them instead!

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,,,,Gem School
  

The potato originated in what is now Peru and Bolivia and its cultivation was widespread in South America before Spanish colonization.



Because potatoes are part of the nightshade family, they can become poisonous if they aren't cultivated correctly. When Europeans first started growing them, they made a lot of mistakes, a lot of people got sick, and Europeans developed a fear of eating them. The French believed that eating potatoes caused leprosy in humans, and in 1748 passed a law banning them. They were used as food for pigs and the desperately poor.

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About 3770 years ago, a Sumerian merchant named Ea-Nasir, sold copper to a man named Nanni. The copper was the wrong quality, so Nanni wrote a letter (on a clay tablet) to complain. We know this because the clay tablet was preserved.

Somehow, the Internet thinks this is hilarious. The story has spawned t-shirts, bumper stickers, fan-fiction, a keyboard?!



Sometimes, I love what our civilization has become.

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We made it to Chicago safely. We actually didn't get to see my brother very much: we spent most of our time waiting for busses and trains and trying to get around a giant city when our smartphone maps were giving us wrong information. But my kids got to spend a lot of time with their cousins.

We visited Millennium Park



and the Field Museum of Natural History



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My brother lives in Chicago. He got remarried last year, but because of COVID, we couldn't attend the wedding. This year, we got together as a family to meet his wife and celebrate.

Chicago is about 12 hours by car from Baltimore, and it's cheaper to drive than to fly. About halfway is Kirtland, Ohio, which was a good place to stop for a break and also an important historical site in my religion.



Even though most things are reopening to some extent, the Kirtland Temple is still closed to the public. But we were able to walk around the grounds and stretch our legs before continuing on our road trip.

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I just watched the movie Prometheus (2012).



I'm generally not a big fan of horror movies, though I have liked several. I likes Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986).

I wasn't watching the movie for fun. I'm preparing to write a Dungeons & Dragons adventure for my friends that takes place inside an ancient spaceship. I'd heard that Prometheus took place inside an ancient spaceship, so I thought maybe it would give me some ideas.

My idea for the game is that long ago there was a war between the dragons and evil space squid. The dragons won, and then sealed their souls into this spaceship like a time capsule. The players will accidentally absorb the souls of the ancient dragons and become the new protectors of the world, just in time for the evil space squid to return.

Anyway, I watched the movie and I was just...


Everyone in the movie was so amazingly stupid and everything was so pointless. It was gross and I didn't get many useful ideas for my game. It was very beautifully-made and it certainly...produced an emotional response.

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There is a story of a man who never went to sea, but he loved pictures of boats and hung them in every room in his house. All of his sons grew up to be sailors.

When I was young, we had a poster world map in our kitchen. At every meal, our eyes would wander over the map. And my brother, sisters, and I almost all became linguists and world travelers.

I got a world map shower curtain for our bathroom. Now, every time they go to the toilet, my kids are looking at the map. (Remember: in an American house, the bathtub/shower is in the same room as the toilet.)



We'll see if the pattern continues.

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The American school year starts in late August or early September. One of the traditions associated with starting a new school year is shopping for school supplies.

In August, all the department stores have sales on kids' clothes, backpacks, pencils, notebooks, calculators, etc. Each school and grade has different requirements, so parents go to the school's website to find the school supply list for their children (or pick up a paper copy from the school or store) to know what to buy.

It's very exciting for a kid. You get to go on a special shopping trip with your parents and pick what color notebook you'll have. Maybe you'll get a really cool pencil with the star-shaped eraser! It's a little like Halloween and a little like Christmas.



In the past few years, our children's school supplies have been provided by the school through government grants and tax dollars. We just go to the school and pick up a backpack full of supplies. I'm not sure if this is because of COVID, because we moved to a school with more poor families, or if this is just the way it works nowadays. Is the tradition of a school supply shopping trip going away? We'll see.

My church is collecting donations of school supplies for refugee children from Afghanistan. Since we didn't have to spend any money for our children's school supplies this year, we decided to take the money that we would have spent on school supplies and instead buy school supplies to donate.

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My daughter wants to get her ham radio license.




The local ham radio club was offering a free class. I asked her if she wanted to take it, and she said yes. She doesn't seem very interested and keeps complaining about it, and I keep telling her, "You don't have to do this. No one is making you do this. You can quit if you don't want to do this." But she keeps saying she wants to continue.

I have mixed feelings about ham radio. I got my ham radio license for fun, but I've almost never used it. I'm very interested in emergency preparedness, but I still think ham radio has become kind of useless. The radios are very expensive, and the people in the hobby are...I have not found them very friendly or helpful, although many of them do try.

Anyway, I've hear that ham radio is fairly popular in Japan? Do you have a ham radio license?

73 de KN4DVV

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My wife's parents visited from South Dakota last weekend, so we too them to see Washington, D.C. and Baltimore.

I've been to Washington, D.C. four times, and each time I've been a little more disappointed. The Smithsonian Museums are nice, and they are free to enter, but they almost never update anything. The National Air and Space Museum is almost exactly the same as it was in 1992 except that it mentions the Columbia space shuttle disaster on a little shelf next to the Challenger space shuttle disaster shelf. It was super cool in 1992 when I was a kid interested in space, but it's really not worth visiting more than once. Everything is too crowded, too loud, and the food is too expensive.

We also went to the National Aquarium in Baltimore. That was amazing.

Lots of live sharks and Australian reef fish in a huge multi-story habitat. There was a room where we could touch horseshoe crabs and skates and stingless jellyfish. It was huge, it was expensive to visit, but well worth it.

What's the most interesting museum you've visited?

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Last time I talked about games I like, I mentioned that I like games with a lot of combinations that make every time you play it different.

Dominion is an award-winning strategy deck-building game. The game's instruction manual does not explain itself very well, and it took me a while to understand what it's about and how it works.



Here's how I explain it to new players: Each player has their own deck of cards. Your cards are your kingdom, and whoever has the best kingdom at the end of the game wins. There are three general types of cards: Actions, Money, and Lands. You play Action cards during your turn to get more Money cards into your hand. Then at the end of your turn you use your Money cards to buy more Actions, Money, and Land cards. Land cards are mostly useless during the game, but they are what determines if you win at the end.

At the beginning of the game, there are 10 types of Action cards on the table. But in the basic box, there are 25 types of Action cards. So, if my math is right, there are 3,268,760 different combinations of the Action cards on the table, and that's without any of the expansions that have been added. So, since I like a lot of varying combinations, this is a game I really like. My wife and I play it almost every week.

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I lived in Italy from 1999-2001. When I got married in 2010, I promised my wife I would take her there on vacation someday. Most other Americans take a big vacation every year, but we've been staying home and saving our money for one really big vacation. Our plan was to go in 2020 for our tenth anniversary, but...

Buon giorno.

We have continued watching how things develop around the world, and we're choosing to be moderately optimistic. After a lot of thought and delay, we just booked our vacation for May 2022. We'll fly to Barcelona and take a cruise ship to Tunis, Palermo, Rome, Genoa, and Marseille.

The one complication is our kids. My kids are good travelers - every time we go on a long road trip, I tell them that this is practice for when we'll take a plane to Italy. But my wife and I are interested in seeing castles, cathedrals, ruins, and art museums, and my kids are...not very interested in that sort of thing. They're mostly excited that there will be a swimming pool on the cruise ship. I want them to experience the cultural treasures of Europe, but I also don't want them to be bored. This is very likely a once-in-a-lifetime trip for us, and we want them to have good memories.

Our next big international vacation will be to Japan. We're hoping for 2025, but we'll see what happens.

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For a long time, I have been interested in getting solar panels on my house. They can be very expensive to install, but then you get free electricity. Or I can get a deal from a solar energy company. They install the solar panels for free, but they get to keep the electricity I make and sell it back to me. So it's not exactly like I get the electricity from the solar panels on my roof. It's more like I allow an energy company to build a small solar power plant on top of my house. But, at the end of the day, I will be paying less for electricity and my energy use will have a lower impact on the environment.

Another reason I was interested in solar power would be to have electricity during a blackout. But this does not work like I'd hoped. If a storm knocks down power lines, my solar system will automatically shut off. This is for safety: if my solar panels were still sending electricity out into the power grid, it wouldn't be safe for electrical workers trying to fix things.

Getting solar panels was a very long process. The company had to take a lot of measurements, make a plan, submit the plan to the local government for approval, and do a bunch of safety inspections. I called them in early May and the solar panels didn't get installed until late July. But when they actually came out to do the installation, that part took only five hours.




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Most of the energy we use is to change temperature. Heating, air conditioning, cooking, and refrigeration make up almost all of your electrical and gas bill. The amount of energy you need for light, music, TV, computers, and even laundry is tiny by comparison.

For most of human history, you had to get that energy delivered to your house. Firewood, ice, candles, lamp oil, coal. And because you had to go out and get it (or arrange for its delivery) yourself, you had choices. If you don't like Johnson's Firewood Company, you can go buy from Smith Firewood Incorporated. Sellers have to compete for customers, and you get the best price. Capitalism 最高!

Then around 150 years ago, companies started sending energy directly into your house with gas pipes and electrical wires. But the energy company owns all the pipes and wires. If you want to stop using Johnson's Electric Company and switch to Smith Energy Incorporated, they have to take out the wire that brings electricity in from the Johnson power plant and put in a new wire that goes to the Smith power plant. If you get power from Smith and your neighbor gets power from Johnson and your other neighbor gets power from O'Malley, it's a mess of wires and pipes and construction and accidents waiting to happen.

It was a mess.

To solve this problem, cities and states sold the right to sell electricity and gas to certain areas. This whole neighborhood now has to get their power from Johnson's Electric Company, so there's only one set of wires to bring electricity in. But because the people in the neighborhood don't have a choice, Johnson's can charge whatever they want and the people have to pay it. Theoretically, the power companies place bids to the government so there would be some competition, but the process was pretty easy to corrupt and the energy companies were able to get powerful monopolies. Capitalism 最低!

To solve this problem, some countries adopted "common carrier" laws, based on older maritime shipping laws. Under common carrier laws, one energy company owns all the wires and pipes, but if somebody wants to buy electricity from a different company, they still have to deliver it. Common carrier laws are also why I can call anyone with a phone number even if they have a different phone company, and it's the legal foundation for net neutrality rules.

My electricity comes from Baltimore Gas & Electric (BG&E). Part of my bill is for "electricity" and another part is for "delivery". I can choose to buy the electricity from some other company, but BG&E owns the wires to my house, so I still have to pay them for the delivery. And BG&E can't charge me a different delivery fee whether I buy my electricity from them or someone else. BG&E makes most of their electricity from natural gas and coal, which, as we all know, is not good for the environment. So I've been interested in switching my energy supply company.

Next time: Going Solar Part 2: Solar Energy World

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Recently, my kids have started watching Hunter × Hunter. There is a scene where the main character finds a message from his father that contains a video game memory cartridge, obviously based on the memory card of the original PlayStation.

I had to explain to my kids that long, long ago, video games came on cartridges and you could not save your game. Then, still long ago, but later, video games came on CDs, and consoles like the PlayStation had memory card slots. Now video game consoles have internal hard drives or connect to the Internet and save to cloud storage. This technology is as foreign to them as vinyl records and typewriters.



It's weird to think about how so many aspects of technology look the same for long periods of time. A video game console is still a box that plugs into your TV. A smartphone today looks like a smartphone from 20 years ago. A car has four tires and a steering wheel. But other aspects of technology, that you think will last forever, are gone before you know it. My new phone doesn't have an SD card slot for storing pictures. My new car doesn't even have keys anymore.

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A while ago, I wrote about making art. For me, camping falls into the same category: I don't hate it, but I almost never feel the desire to do it. Camping gear is expensive, and it seems like spending a lot of money to be less comfortable than I would be at home or in a hotel.

Camping is one of those things that Americans - especially white, middle-class American men - feel like they are supposed to like and be good at. If you don't like camping, you're not a Real American™.



My sister lives near Boston; I live near Baltimore. We haven't seen each other for a long time, so we agreed to meet somewhere for a mini family reunion. The Catskills region of New York State is about halfway between our homes, so we agreed to join them for a camping trip at North-South Lake State Park.

The first day was super foggy. We hiked up to Kaaterskill Falls

and played in North-South Lake


The next day was sunny, so we went to Kaaterskill Falls again, but this time we could see them

and played in the lake again (no pictures)

I had an...okay time. I'm too tall to fit in a most tents, so I didn't sleep well and I was always wet. We aren't very experienced campers, so we forgot a lot of important things at home and weren't very well prepared. My kids had a good time with their cousins, and it was good to see my sister again. My wife wants to go camping more often in the future, so I guess this was good practice.

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It's hurricane season! In the past couple of weeks, we have already had some severe thunderstorms and a tornado, and tropical storm Elsa is passing near my home just now.

The National Weather Service issues hurricane warnings and hurricane watches, but even many native English speakers don't understand what the difference between these terms is.




If you are traveling in the USA and you hear there is a severe weather watch (hurricane watch, tornado watch, etc.), that means a very bad storm will probably happen. Get ready and keep listening to the weather.

If you hear there is a severe weather warning (hurricane warning, tornado warning, etc.), that means a very bad storm is happening now. Get to a safe place.

Thanks for reading and be safe!