Note on Japanese writing -- I hope the encoding works out.


Did you learn any of the kana before you left? It's useful for reading all the hidden English loanwords.
frak. the encoding borked.
but wait, I looked in firefox and the encoding suddenly worked. But, yeah, I think maybe the comment thingy needs to be UTF-8-ified.
I think the "throw someone under the bus" has to do with the fact that, like getting pushed in front of the subway, it's something that happens so quickly that one can barely react, much less defend against the attack-- it's about being blindsided with a lethal attack.
That, or it's some sort of weird "Speed" reference to Keanu Reeves that I haven't figured out yet.
Heh, Nick, my language inability is so massive that I learned only the tiniest sprinkling of convenient phrases, never mind actual letters...
LAN3, that makes sense, still seems a little arbitrary.
And Yay Red Sox!
It's too bad I didn't recommend for you that book that'll teach you all the kana in about a week. And it's still a bit of a struggle.
Also, weird how American sports can be watched over there. When I was in Tokyo, I saw part of a San Diego football game that was being played right here in Phoenix because of wildfires.
According to The Consumerist, there was some sort of outage at both Comcast and DirecTV which meant that sports fans who woke up early to see the game (which started at 6AM eastern, 3AM Pacific) were SOL. Comcasters got a $2 credit for the outage.