10/6/2006

Sorry, I don’t have the time to maintain a personal blog so you’ll have to put up with me as I talk about personal stuff that has nothing to do with this blog. I think I’m breaking rule #3* of blog writing or something but I don’t care. La la la…

How does a puzzle become so popular?

I saw an old man on the train the other day doing a sudoku puzzle. This is the first time I’ve seen anybody doing sudoku in Japan. I was totally blown away at how popular that puzzle has gotten when I was visiting the US last month. Barnes&Nobles had a whole sudoku section with its own tag and everything. I think the sections in that area of the store were like: Health, Cooking…, and Sudoku. I’m totally puzzled with it’s recent popularity since it’s supposed to come from Japan and yet I’ve never seen it or heard anybody talk about it here. I couldn’t even tell you where to go to buy some puzzles. I mean, the Brain Training Game for the Nintendo DS is originally a Japanese game but they added sudoku puzzles for the American version. That would be like McDonalds adding fries to their menu in their Japanese stores while American get stuck with 枝豆 or something. Pretty crazy, if you ask me.

Anyway, I was guessing that maybe sudoku in Kanji would be something like 「数解」 using the characters for “number” and “to solve”. On reflection, I guess that was unlikely because 「すう」 is the on-yomi and 「とく」 is the kun-yomi. 「数解」 would probably be read 「すうかい」 or 「かずどき」 instead. I was surprised though when I found out that the actual Kanji is 「数独」. I got the “number” kanji right but the second one means, “alone”. I guess those numbers are just alone and lonely until you solve the puzzle by filling in the rest of the numbers. Aww… those poor, lonely numbers. You have to help them!

Yet more random thoughts

I ate a コンビニ弁当 for dinner tonight and it was supposed to be a 中華弁当. I think almost every country probably has their own version of Chinese food. I’ve had American-Chinese, Japanese-Chinese, and Korean-Chinese so far. As usual, when it comes to food, I like the Korean version the best. (The one version I’ve never had is, ironically, Chinese-Chinese). You can tell when Chinese food is Korean in disguise when they bring out the Kimchi, 沢庵, and raw onion with the mysterious black sauce. To this day, I have no idea what that black sauce is but it doesn’t stop me from eating it with sliced, completely raw onions. (I think you have to kind of get used to it from birth). Also for some reason, you almost always eat 짜장면. It’s called ジャージャー麺 in Japanese but the Korean version tastes much better. Again, I have no idea about the actual original Chinese dish.