Japanese friend in Warsaw

Original YT playout date: 24 February 2009
Duration: 24:49

Here is a day spent in the company of Takahiro Kajiura, an intelligent and cultured gentleman from the land of the flowering cherry.

I used for the background the song Ue o muite arukō, also known as Sukiyaki, by Kyu Sakamoto. This is a song I remembered from earliest childhood, which Takahiro-san helped me to identify.

上を向いて歩こう
Ue o muite arukō
I shall walk looking up

涙がこぼれないように
namida ga kobore nai yō ni
So that my tears won’t fall

思い出す春の日
Omoidasu haru no hi
Remembering Spring days

一人ぼっちの夜
Hitori bocchi no yoru
On this lonely night.
Continue reading “Japanese friend in Warsaw”

#3 Numa Fan muckaround

Playout date: 22 October 2006
Camera: Logitech Webcam
Post Production: None
Location: Home
Other people featured: Sophie
Genre: Family, musical muckaround
Music used:
Languages used: Romanian, English
Animals featured: None

Early YT legend (and one of my sources) Brookers did a muckaround video called #1 Numa fan, to which someone else called Ognog responded with #2 and this was intended as a response to that, although right now that film has faded into obscurity with only 70 thousand hits to Brookers’ 7 million for the original muckabout, and this one by is only had 700. Leading to the observation that you loose two zeroes off the end whenever you go back one “generation” in spoofing something. Only one in a hundred people actually look at responses, it would seem!

What this all is is part of that whole craze from about 5 years back about the so-called “Numa” song. It was actually “Dragostea din tei” or “Love from the linden trees” by Hajducii, or the Outlaws, a Romanian group who managed to become the Summer hit of the year with this dancey tune. The lyrics to the chorus go “Vrei sa pleci dar nu ma, nu ma iei, nu ma nu ma nu me iei” and the repetition of “nu ma” gave the song its English name. It’s a bit like the Japanese hit Sukiyaki, which received that name as nobody could say “Ue wo muite arukou”.

The chorus in Romanian actually means “You want to leave, but you are not taking me” and the nu ma is ‘Not me’, so that it sounds like the “not me” song.