Posts Tagged: poo

Miscellaneous — 12 Comments
23
Aug 08

Wordpress Pages and Babysitting Rikuto

What did I do today?

I made a math worksheet about bus timetables, then I spent the rest of the day babysitting Rikuto while his mum was at work. We watched some Olympic volleyball, then played in the street on his little Thomas the Tank Engine train.

Rikuto is suffering from diarrhea at the moment which means after holding him for a while, my arms smell of poo.

What did I learn today?

global $post;
if(is_page() && $post->post_parent) {
     echo "do something";
}

That little conditional works on Wordpress. If you paste it into a page template, you can determine whether or not the page is a parent or child. It’s really saying, “If this is a page and it has a parent, it must be a child so (do something)”.

What did you learn today?

Japan — 1 Comment
27
Dec 07

Lucky Japanese Elephant Poo Charms

Japanese New Year is the season of Omikuji – random fortunes written on strips of paper that tell you whether the new year will be a good one or not. Many Japanese people are superstitious and believe in fortune tellers such as Kazuko Hosoki, and lucky charms called Omamori.

Elephant poo lucky charmProtect yourself with elephant poo

For many years, my favorite Japanese lucky charm was the faceless baby monkey, Sarubobo, from Takayama. That was until Utsunomiya Zoo in Tochigi prefecture recently started making lucky charms out of elephant poo. According to the Mainichi newspaper, these Omamori are made “by extracting fiber from the dung of a 36-year-old Asian elephant, then sterilizing it and processing it into paper”.

Elephant poo helps you get into university

These elephant dung charms are given away free to students preparing for university entrance exams, and have the Japanese for “pass” written on them in red characters. While students might be rushing to the zoo to get their poo charms, the rest of the population would probably prefer to “pass” up this offer ;-)

Scientifically proven to boost your grades?

Zookeeper Ayako Nakamura is responsible for this stroke of marketing genius. Even if these lucky charms don’t bring any benefit whatsoever, at least they have been popular with visitors, with many of them describing the poo as “cute”. There’s no such thing as science when it comes to luck. However, even without proof that these things bring you better grades, I’d still want some elephant poo in my pocket if I were taking exams.