1. I had The Flight of the Bumblebee in my head for eight hours at work today. I am completely exhausted from jiggling my leg in time all day.

2. Over the weekend I went drinking with my friend Y. We saw something called "healthy fried chicken" (ヘルシー空揚げ) on the menu, and ordered it out of curiosity. It took a long time to arrive -- so long that I began to suspect that I had unwittingly involved myself in some kind of performance art highlighting the folly and futility of requesting "healthy fried chicken". When it finally came out of the kitchen, it looked just like any other kara-age, right down to the dish of mayonnaise (!) on the side.

"Excuse me," Y. asked. "Just curious: what exactly is healthy about this fried chicken with mayonnaise?"

"We make it with breast meat," the proprietress explained.

Linguistic fun fact: Etymologically speaking, kara-age means "plain [← kara, empty] frying", because you use either no batter or a very light one to make it (as opposed to, say, tempura). You often see it written 唐揚げ, which means "Chinese-style frying", but this is ateji; the kara- in words like karaimo (Chinese potato) and karauta (Chinese poem) is not related to the kara that means empty. (It's probably a state or city-state name from ancient Korea.)