Glittery Ephemera

kids, try this at home!

By J. L. Bastiat ⋅ May 26, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

(The Volokh Conspiracy, Rube Goldberg Video, Fun for Small Kids)

Here’s some fun stuff for you!

If I may flash back to Japan for a moment, I’ll share that one of the exercises we did with our high school students in the EFL classroom was part of a unit on inventions (the vocabulary of devices and technology, grammar skills for sequencing, giving instructions, and advanced description of objects). The major project in the unit was devising and presenting an invention. One approach was to make the invention a serious and useful one; some of my fellow teachers and I, however, liked to try to make it fun by requesting Rube Goldberg devices.

Now that I know they had Pythagoras Switch (thanks to a VC commenter) on TV, I know I should have asked them to build ‘em, too!

The slogan you hear in each segment of this (and the katakana writing on the signs) says “pitagorasu suiichi”–the pronunciation in Japanese morae of “Pythagoras Switch” with, I think, added musical and rhythmic emphasis to make “ichi” at the end sound like the Japanese for the number one, or “ichi.” That would be a pretty typical Japanese bilingual word play.

Enjoy the rest of your Memorial Day! Extra thanks to those abroad, those who have been abroad, those who may be sent abroad, and those at home. With gratitude to a God who has worked by them, and by others we remember–or commemorate unknowing–to make a space in history for His Word to be freely spoken, and in which we have flourished.