1 BOO!

2 Yay!

Was there a second series?  Is anybody doing it?

3

Whaddayemean "Boo"?

As to a second series, yes there was. So far as I know no one is doing it.

Wasurenai's dedication to the first series has been half-hearted at best. The last episode before these two came out last December, and they started working on it (with ep 10) about a year ago.

4

Whaddayemean "Boo"?

I'm an old man.
I'm on their list of greatest fears...so I said "BOO!".

Boo as in "BOO!" not the opposite of "YAY!"

5 Those are the classic "four fears". Almost a rhyme (which is why "oyaji" goes at the end, since the word they use for fire there is "kaji").

6 If I'm not mistaken, isn't the "oyaji" supposed to refer to one's father?  I'm pretty sure that's how we learned it in Japanese Culture class.

7

You can use it that way. (Ranma does, for instance.) But it means "old man".

In Ichigo Mashimaro there are a couple of places where Chika taunts her older sister Nobue by calling her "oyaji". (This is when Nobue has convinced Matsuri to wear a cat costume and go "nyan".) In this case, the implication is "dirty old man".

8  I correct myself:

親 means parent
父 means father

But it can also be used to mean "old man", any arbitrary old man. Family words are like that. "Onii-san" means "older brother" but it also means any older boy. "Oba-san" means "aunt" but it also means "any middle aged woman".

9 There's different kanji that's specific to the "old man" meaning (老爺), but usage seems to strongly favor 親父 for both meanings, with the katakana オヤジ being popular for the "creepy older guy" situation.

-j

10 Oh, I didn't know about the different kanji/spellings.  What I meant was that when we learned about the saying in a Japanese Culture class I took, the professor taught it as earthquakes, lightning, fire, and one's father being the greatest fears.  Some basic web-searching (after finding a search string that didn't just result in disaster news) found consistent results:

http://blog.al.com/press-register-commentary/2011/03/insight_the_japanese_are_calm.html

http://www.stockkanji.com/Earthquakes_Thunderbolts_Fires_Fathers_jishin_kaminari_kaji_oyaji

11

Well, in this case it definitely isn't "father". They're referring to Galileo, Da Vinci, and Hertz.

12 The wikipedia entry for 親父 says that it's believed the last word of the proverb was originally ooyamaji (大山風, an old word for typhoon), eventually corrupted to "oyaji".

-j

13

The wikipedia entry for 親父says that it's believed the last word of the proverb was originally ooyamaji (大山風, an old word for typhoon), eventually corrupted to "oyaji".

Who said the ancients didn't had a sense of humor?