Chris Glick welcomes you (in
Japanese), whoever you are!
What can I say? I'm quite pleased that you've decided to come this far!
Table of contents
- A brief autobiographical sketch
- Less than professional matters
- Links to various sites unrelated to my teaching
Born in architecturally astounding (for its size) Columbus, Indiana, USA, I was whisked through Topeka, Kansas (so flat you can see the horizon bend); Huntsville, Alabama (where my family bought a "dawg"); Centerville, Ohio (the Wright Bros. had their bicycle shop nearby); and, lastly, to Lafayette, Indiana, whose fine local newspaper I once delivered is "hyar", as the locals would say. I went on to wonderful Indiana
University in Bloomington, Indiana, for a BA in Geography (Cartography) and MA in Applied Linguistics; I taught English at the CELT (Center for English Language Training), which is a great program in an outstanding and safe Midwestern town (try the local internet provider) for students of English. I left for a job on the beautiful northern island of Hokkaido at its eponymous university in Sapporo, Japan,. After five years there I returned to the US for some more classes (learned some Java) then came back to Japan, to The University of Tokushima!
- Use Macintosh,
write HTML, and try to learn Java and JavaScript
- Read whenever possible, especially The Economist, National Geographic, Reason, Penguin Classics, and nonfiction
- Study Japanese, emphasizing kanji, Japanese and Chinese characters like
meaning "beard"
- Play the ukulele. Hear me playing and suffer for yourself. I bought mine on Kauai, Hawaii. My soprano uke was made by Jim Adwell, who has since moved on to other things. I can also play the Ainu mukkuri, which is something like a jaw harp, only it is a piece of bamboo that has a vibrating central tang to which a cord to yank is attached.
- I dabble with writing music on my computer, mainly typing in old sheet music. If you're so inclined as well, try the unbeatable shareware program Melody.
- Diligently seek out not new life-forms but new restaurants wherever I live.
- Listen to music I wish I could play on my uke:
- Old Hawaiian steel guitar 78rpm recordings, especially those of the masters, Sol Hoopii and King Benny Nawahi
- DEVO, long a favorite
- Robert Crumb and his Cheap Suit Serenaders who do Tin Pan Alley and hula numbers, even pulling out all the stops with an occasional singing saw
- 1960s African pop, especially Ghanaian highlife and Kenyan pre-benga sounds
- Old Congolese/Zairois music, especially Franco et l'OK Jazz
- Watch silent movies, especially those of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. I also like the talkies of W.C. Fields quite a bit.
- Marvel old (before 1974) British cars, despite their chronic ailments. Lucas electrical junk, though, I can do without (and often did with my long-gone 1971 MGB)
- Enjoy motorcycles of all types. I had a 1971 Honda CB350 in high school and bought a 1990 Yamaha YX600 in college. Although I don't have the patience to keep one running, a 1972 Triumph Bonneville 650 Mk. V would truly make my day.
- Use Macintosh OS X, jack-of-all-trades and master of none AppleWorks 6 for many things but increasingly Mellel and Nisus Writer Express for word processing, nifty Easy Grade Pro X to manage students, top notch BBEdit for websites, super-duper OmniWeb for websurfing, speedy JEDict for Japanese and UltraLingua for German study, and p22 fonts for some of my class materials. To deal with Redmond's stuff (i.e., Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files), I use el cheapo (only $40 or so!) but powerful ThinkFree Office 2.2 and Dcouments To Go.
- Use an outstanding Palm Tungsten T2 daily for Japanese study with shareware WalkingJE 1.5 (worth the price, believe me) and freeware Dokusha 1.5 (wow!) and typing caffeine-fuelled rants with WordSmith 2.2 and a folding keyboard. The Splash Wallet suite is a great deal, too!
- For superior online editing of papers in English, contact Bruce Leeds, an Indiana University professor
- Keep abreast of the real news with the occasionally contrarian but always interesting analyses of Chrenkoff
- The Indiana
Historical Bureau. I'm an associate member; it's my little bit to support and promote my home state. In case you're wondering, they grow corn there. (And have two of the best public universities in the US: Indiana U. and Purdue!)
- The excellent shareware program EarthBrowser to keep an eye on the globe, being as I am a somewhat restrained cartography freak
- If you want voice recognition software for the Mac, go with iListen, which I use for various things, especially writing email and letters. Talk and it writes--great!
Take me home.