Evidence for the prosecution

(April 18, 2008) As part of its abuse and neglect case, my blog offered up this pointless morsel into evidence. It has allegedly been sitting as a draft since it was first written and then apparently abandoned in late 2006. Lawyers for the lazy could not be bothered to comment.
Since the NYT link won't really work anymore, let me clarify; I have no idea anymore what the article was about. The Ann Coulter bit is always amusing, though.
Well, if Bush says so, what kind of fools would we be to listen to the professionals?
Ann Coulter has a tantrum

Psychic, I tell ya

Wow, me and the New York Times (you know, the liberal rag that's the voice of the evil Jews and homosexuals), we're like this. I know you couldn't see that, but my fingers were entwined, symbolizing our union in bacchanalian homage to Satan, in whose service we are determined to ruin your family by not being like you. My chaotic rant the other day about language and what have you must have inspired them (the NYT, that is), because on the very same day they published an article about "Bucking the English-only Mentality" in education. Keep in mind that I'm in Japan, so my September 24th is 12 hours or so ahead of theirs, so no I didn't read it - and still can't. They've reached some higher level of evil, probably at least level 16, while I'm a mere level 5, so I'm not allowed to read the article unless I actually pay for Times Select. If anyone has the text I'd much appreciate it. (Can you imagine the nerve in the age of the internet, to demand that people actually give money for something besides their connection? That's evil squared.)

Another interesting article I admit I haven't had time to fully read, but looks very good, is this one from 1993 (ok, i know it's pretty old) about alcohol consumption maybe not being a bad thing in moderation. I'll see the authors of that in Hell while we're being violated in every orifice and then some by demons on "Takin' Care of Liberals" duty. The article refers to another NYT article about a couple who lost their restaurant in Red country (NC) because they put wine on the menu, and their righteous asinine Christian customership dried up because how dare that be a choice.

Oh yeah, and another in the DUH category: the Iraq war increased the real threat of terrorism. Directly. Cause and effect. This one's gonna need a lot of spin, like in one of those high G-force simulators fighter pilots and astronauts use, whipping out the old Gravitron won't do it this time.

That's all. The post stops here.

How to feel inadequately traveled

These are the countries I've been to. And even then it's grossly exaggerated, I've only been to tiny portions of these places.



Create your own visited countries map

That's all, the last two posts were pretty long so I'll change it up a bit here and not write pages upon pages of nothing in particular. I'm all about the variety.

10 things

Credo - 10 things you have to believe to be a Republican
Lies and Lying Liars who Fund Them

Just a couple of links to great entries in a health-related blog. Ok, so the first link is more of a rant about people dense enough to support Bush, but generally the authors' posts are really insightful and focused on health issues, but as health care is tied inextricably to the economy and politics, it's a pretty far-ranging topic.

Anyway, on to today's ramblings. I was in the movie rental store ("Family Book") the other day and noticed some of the changed titles on Japanese releases of "Foreigner" movies. Conan is no longer a Barbarian, he's Conan the Great. Kinda makes Arnie sound like a magician. Or there's Resident Evil becoming Biohazard, and many others. But the one that fascinated me was The Color of Money - which becomes Hustler 2. Why the 2? I couldn't find anything just called Hustler, let alone a prequel to Color. (Added Sep. 26 - Ok, so maybe there is a sort of prequel. See the comments. My bad.) Maybe just because Newman and Cruise were partners, but the title is still gibberish. It drives me nuts to watch language being butchered like this, and this is a mild example. I don't care if people anywhere want to change the titles of whatever they want to make more sense to the locals, but to make a mockery of someone else's language to do it is just lame. I know this in itself isn't really a big deal, but so many things in Japan do this. Some phrase that is at best vaguely recognizable as having some meaning in English becomes standard Japanese, to the point that even though borrowed foreign words are written in a separate alphabet (linguistic apartheid?) Japanese people often don't realize that it's actually neither Japanese nor real English. Things like "Everybody fashion!"(a current popular slogan) are part of the common vernacular.

Surely a huge cause of this is that English is considered pretty cool here and probably anywhere that still buys the mythology of the American Dream - I don't know how many times I've seen "American Coffee" advertised like it's gold - but it doesn't seem so much to ask that we not be constantly talked down to by people who insist the general public can't handle anything that takes more than 30 seconds to communicate. Japan's uniquely tortured, fashionable English is well-documented and famous but reaches well beyond its shores. Western celebrities who take spots in Japanese commercials for quick cash on the side usually seem to keep their integrity hovering at least a few millimeters off the floor - Tommy Lee Jones barely speaks or does so in Japanese in this Boss Coffee commercial, Kiefer Sutherland manages to make sense in his Calorie Mate spots, there are others from Ang Lee, Natalie Portman, Angelina Jolie, maybe we can pass off John Travolta's shot because it was the 80's and just a brand name anyway, and Ahnuld skips on English, not that that's unusual, but if anyone can find the spot Uma Thurman is in with the Kill Bill costume on a motorcycle spouting nonsense, I'd be much obliged. Now that's rock bottom. The whisky commercial with Bill Murray in Lost in Translation is not far off at all - obviously it's just a paycheck, but how hard can it be for someone with that kind of star power to look at a script written in their native tongue and suggest changes?

The company I work for is technically a publishing company, with a native English-speaking staff of around 300 and growing, but their publications and even their English textbooks are riddled with mistakes too typically Japanese and awkward to make on a keyboard to believe that they were just typos. Obviously someone was too proud to ask a decent proofreader to have a look. I can't help but picture the nephews of company chairmen all over the country assuming that their 6 months abroad made them fluent enough to write anything you please in English, and then unable to risk losing face by getting a proofreader even if they were willing to do so.

None of this is to say that Japanese is alone in this. We do it all the time in English, and to a far larger extent, given how eclectic and flexible the language is, and how far the British Empire stretched. Then there are helpless and confused Chinese characters tattoed all over people who couldn't be bothered to find out what they mean or get them done properly. French and Spanish words routinely have all their grace and music stripped when they get assimilated. English is like the Borg, it's the ten-cent whore of the language world. It just absorbs everything, which is both its beauty and its greatest weakness. Sure it's a language of amazing versatility (and don't even get me started on the "language of Shakepseare" bit), but that versatility brings the pitfall of believing there's no point in learning other languages, like the apocryphal stories of Americans who've never been more than 5 or 10 miles from home, despite the relative wealth, freedom, and opportunity to travel, because "we done got ever'thang a body needs right here". Aside from the mental benefits of bilingualism, especially from an early age, there are untranslatable words in every language.

Maybe I'm weird but I believe in knowledge for the sake of knowledge, learning just for the joy of it, art for art's sake, all that liberal hippy crap. I hope and believe that most people share that view, although I have to wonder how people of otherwise reasonable intelligence can not only believe in God but insist that God and science are mutually exclusive. If God created the universe, didn't he also create the laws of science that govern it? I don't go quite as far as Richard Dawkins in this clip from The Root of All Evil, where the premise is essentially that religion is destroying civilization, but I do believe that the spiritual benefits of any religion and the inner peace faith can bring have to be weighed carefully against the radical elements and intolerance that people seem determined to read into religious texts. (Yes, I do realize my topic is wandering a bit, check the title of the blog.)



On the other hand, maybe I'm just getting all preachy because what I ended up renting was V for Vendetta. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend it, not as the typical Hollywood wire-fighting and stuff blowing up fare, but because it's a thought-provoking look at terrorism and the mindset that inspires it, and the idea that in the right circumstances it's not necessarily a bad thing. The movie doesn't offer pat answers about right and wrong, though it does lean towards V pretty strongly in most parts and is full of obvious references to the Bush administration.

Unfortunately the disc also included the pilot of "Supernatural", a mind-numbingly flat ghost story series that's probably old news or hopefully cancelled back home by now. I watched the entire painful episode hoping to find enough in the end to redeem it. No luck.

That's about all for today, I'll leave you with two things: one last photo, just a light chuckle. If you think God and Technology can't coexist, check out this computer school. And last, a reminder that mangling English can also be fun!

Now you see me

Wow, time really does fly when you're having fun. I've been away for a while, but I've been having a blast. Loads to talk about, but I haven't got a whole lot of time just now. I'll get through what I can, and for the rest, you'll just have to... wait longer.

Several friends have had their escaping from Japan parties in the last couple of weeks, so I've spent a few days in Saitama, the concrete bleah between Gunma and Tokyo. I forgot to bring my camera when I went to Molly and Andrew's combined sayonara party, which is just as well, because surprise surprise, I got drunk and sang my voice off at karaoke till 5 am. But I don't think I particularly made an ass of myself, which is a nice change. Everyone else was drunk anyway, so here's hoping they won't remember if I did.

On the job front, I hope I'm not jinxing anything here, but I applied for a promotion to the curriculum development team and they're going to bring me down to Nagoya to test run for a few days at Head Office. Apparently I'm one of two finalists. If it comes down to a swimsuit competition I haven't got a chance though; I have a feeling the other applicant is a girl. My sneaking suspicion is that they just wanna laugh at me and staple my tie to things, but I guess I'll find out. If that doesn't pan out, I have two other standing job offers with different companies and I might go to one of those.

My kickstand was stolen about two weeks ago. I have a fairly nice bike that saves me a ton of money when it comes to trains, and I parked it at the train station bike parking lot for about three hours while I went out carousing with some friends, when I came back the kickstand was gone. Friggin high school kids. I guess it serves me right, I had an accessory pouch under the seat and forgot my hex wrench set in there. (The whole pouch was stolen, but I don't particularly need or miss it or anything that was in it.) It was just attached with velcro, so I'm betting some kid stole the pouch, looked inside and found the hex wrenches, and thought, "what the hell, why not go for gold?" My idea at the moment, assuming I even bother to buy a new one, is to put a note inside the accessory pouch written in French, maybe make it look like a love note or something so that the kid might get curious about what it says and take it to a teacher for kicks, but it'll actually say "whoever gave you this stole it from my bike" or words to that effect. Any suggestions on what to put on the note are welcome, just leave a comment on this post. I try to keep it in perspective anyway, knowing the entire bike would likely have been stolen several times over by now if I used such a flimsy lock in North America.

Beside one of my schools there's a new ramen restaurant where the owner, a friend of one of my coworkers, never lets me pay for anything and keeps piling more food in front of me. He's like my Japanese mom. His English skills and those of his staff are shall we say non-existent, so I muddle through in Japanese as best I can and we all usually manage to get our ideas across. A few weeks ago he invited me to a seasonal restaurant he owns along with two of my coworkers and their boyfriend and husband respectively. (No, it was not a triple date.) The restaurant is on the banks of the Kiryu River and they offer very very fresh fish kept in a large pool by the entrance.

Eating this thing is a ritual in itself: first you gently mash it with your chopsticks, then use them to sever the tail and most of the head - but leave the spine intact. Then you grab the head and pull out the spine, ribcage, organs and the majority of the tiny bones intact. Voila! dig in... there's not a whole lotta meat left on one of these little guys after all that, but it's pretty good. Unfortunately I lack the finesse required to do the surgery just so, and I always ended up just pulling the head off. Then I had to rummage around with my fingers in hot deep-fried fish to find the spine and ever so gently pull it out. By far the most interesting dish of the evening, and I distinguish 'interesting' from 'good' here, was a paste made by pureeing the organs of one or two of the little guys. It's in the blue china dish in the background. It was a nasty pale brown and had to be one of the most bitter things I've ever tasted. Fotunately it was only about a teaspoon of the stuff, but even so only two of us even tried it at all. A tiny dab on one of my chopsticks was enough to tell me it wasn't for me, but Takako managed to finish hers somehow, grimacing the whole time. Ninomiya-san, the owner, had to take off early to go back to his other restaurant, but he warned us before he left that it was not a dish to everyone's liking, so we really didn't have to feel obliged to eat it. Phew. There were also several other varieties of fish, lots of beer, and a dessert that tastes kinda like a puff of dust in jello, and everyone left feeling quite content but knowing we'd be hungry again soon.

It was quite a nice evening, sitting in an open-sided building on the banks of the river that the fish came from so their cousins can watch you disembowel and eat their family, and as the five of us left we figured the bill would probably come to at least 6 or 7 thousand yen each (60-70 dollars, and well worth it), but the cashier had instructions not to let us pay for any of it, or give us any information about how much it would have been.

Thanks, Ninomiya-san!

I've got a backlog of funny pictures, but I think I'll wrap up for the day with just this one of a music shop here in Kiryu. See if you can spot the most interesting instrument they offer.



"Lessons in what? I know I have a skin flute around here somewhere... or perhaps you meant a rusty trombone?" Actually I had to check the real definition, which is disappointingly mundane, but it sure stands out doesn't it?

Well, gee, Cletus, ya think?

Wow. Oops. I just realized this post is a bit outdated. I started it a few days ago and didn't have time to finish it, and you know how the hours just fly by when you're playing with your belly button lint or whatever the hell I was doing. So here it is days late and getting stale, but I gotta feed this monkey! So I'm posting it anyway.

The Senate Intelligence Committee (no, it's not a search for some or an oxymoron) yesterday released last year's report by the CIA about Hussein-Al Qaeda ties. More specifically, the complete lack of them. About the only surprise in the report is that the Republican-controlled committee let the word out. Sure, the real thing came out last year, but better late than never, right? At least it was in time for the elections. It just might have been a threat to National Security to tell the mothers of 3,000 dead soldiers that their children died not to spread democracy or fight terrorism, but for oil. On the other hand, I have heard of a documentary about the soldiers in Iraq (I can't find it now) where one of them says "I sure hope we're here for oil" or something to that effect. Oh goody. This is the kind of stuff Ann Coulter skims off the top of her fetid little pond of a mind. (My all-time favorite by her is, "I'm a Christian first and a mean-spirited, bigoted conservative second, and don't you ever forget it." But it is a very hard choice; there is a lot of really premium, choice idiocy among her nosenuggets of wisdom. One more: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war." Delightful lady, isn't she?)

As recently as Aug. 21, President Bush said at a news conference that Mr. Hussein “had relations with Zarqawi.’’ But a C.I.A. report completed in October 2005 concluded instead that Mr. Hussein’s government “did not have a relationship, harbor or even turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates,” according to the new Senate findings.

The C.I.A. report also contradicted claims made in February 2003 by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who mentioned Mr. Zarqawi no fewer than 20 times during a speech to the United Nations Security Council that made the administration’s case for going to war. In that speech, Mr. Powell said that Iraq “today harbors a deadly terrorist network’’ headed by Mr. Zarqawi, and dismissed as “not credible’’ assertions by the Iraqi government that it had no knowledge of Mr. Zarqawi’s whereabouts.

Well, color me surprised...

I looked at my good friend Youtube's belly button lint for a while and came up with these:

MC Bush on The Daily Show
A trippy effects video with real quotations
Don't worry when you see the title of this one
George Bush: Mistaken

And last, here's another article similar to the one mentioned in the previous post about the spread of Western lifestyle and eating habits creating problems for people around the world.

Thanks for reading.

In my own little corner

Since I live in japan, it's always a treat when I find English reading outside of the internet, especially when it's not the spin-it-till-it-pukes swill that Fox et al pump out. So when I found a good, lucid article about the problems of a growing population - not in numbers, but in literal size, I just had to come back to the net and create a link so that I can find it again. (Added 09/12:) Here's my favorite bit:

Technology has changed everything but us. We evolved to survive scarcity. We crave fat. We're quick to gain weight and slow to lose it. Double what you serve us; we'll double what we eat. Thanks to technology, the deprivation that made these traits useful is gone. So is the link between flavors and nutrients. The food industry can sell you sweetness without fruit, salt without protein, creaminess without milk. We can fatten and starve you at the same time.

Please have a look for yourself, but be careful not to be branded Anti-American (thanks Kris!) just because you like to hear ideas once in a while.

Also, please be patient with me while I bring the last trinkets from the old site over.

Finally, a solution!

You know, a lot of good things have come out of Switzerland: knives, watches, Einstein's famous e=thingy, Cyndi Lauper's ancestors. The Swiss invented light, and just look how handy that turned out to be.

Yes, they're an innovative and hardworking bunch of folks, and recently Canada had the benefit of one of Switzerland's pioneer thinkers turn his attention to our highway woes. Specifically, speeding. During a brief roadside interview last Sunday, he took a few moments of his tremendously valuable time and disclosed the seeds of a potential solution to an undisclosed OPP officer. So Canada, what are you waiting for? Send in the goats!

please hold...

Looks like I'm gonna have to migrate my posts over here manually. This could take a while.
(Cue muzak)
Done! (I think). I had no way to bring the comments over, but not to worry, they're still on the old version. Meanwhile, all new posts will show up here. The 'migrated' tag is on all the old ones to satisfy all your nostalgic needs, not to mention the original blog still going strong, or at least cryogenically preserved.

Go ahead, make my... order a double

(Original post and comments here.)

You know how it is. You want extra butter? Dark meat, anyone? Gravy on your salad? They deep-fry the fries here in a vat of cheese and top them with crisp chicken skin, want some? Well, according to this guy, or at least the doctor who autopsied him, go ahead. The 5'7", 140-lb last surviving WW1 vet in California died at 112, with the organs of a 50 or 60 year old, even though his diet consisted "largely of sausages and waffles." The same doctor went on to say, “A lot of people think or imagine that your good habits and bad habits contribute to your longevity. But we often find it is in the genes rather than lifestyle.” (Click the title for the article these quotations came from.)

I think that's just misleading. I'm no doctor, but I think it's a fair guess to say the vast majority of people don't have the genes to live a long life with a crappy diet and bad habits, and the burden on our economy and health care systems is on my side in this one, I think. (The Canadian site, not as good, is here.) It's absurd and harmful for a doctor to say crap like this without clarifying himself, and it's the kind of thing that hardens tobacco lobbyists' nipples. This is the crap they seize on, despite years of science, common knowledge, and a pretty good recent US federal court ruling against tobacco companies. I know there's no mention in the first article of the "supercentenarian" being a smoker, but I've already talked about obesity above and in a previous post, and even though some of the comments there made it clear that some people didn't realize I was kidding in that one, I'm gonna lay off. In any case, smoking definitely deserves a serious mention here as a huge risk factor and cause of grief for millions of people.

I'm becoming a grumpy old fart. Ah well, whatcha gonna do? To lighten the mood, here's a photo of a toilet.

Teehee, it's a toilet!

Aha, but not just any toilet. Note the sticker on the underside of the lid. Can't read it? Try this one(click for a larger version):

Instructions!

See, some very rural people or older folks in Japan who still aren't used to western toilets don't quite get the idea. Once in a while you can still walk into a public bathroom and find footprints on the seat, facing the back. So they include instructions, and pretty detailed ones at that. Meticulous folks, the Japanese.

6 Minutes of Awesome

(Original post and comments here.)

Click the title, take 6 minutes out of your day, and enjoy. This should be the most linked to video on the net for the next few days. Absolutely brilliant. I just hope a few americans see it before they head to the polls.

Holy Brastrap Batman!

(Original post and comments here.)

I'm stunned. Flabbergasted has been redefined. I'm blown away, and can't decide whether I'm upset or not about there not being any photos to go along with this post. I want proof. I've just seen the most unbelievable thing yet on Japanese television, and I cannot conceive of what will take its place. When I've talked to people about what they know about Japanese tv invariably it's something about Iron Chef or maybe Takeshi's Castle, but this is something that I think the west is unlikely to ever syndicate. Keep in mind that it was only around 9:30, maybe 10.

The only thing I can do is describe the show. Please bear with me, this is my best approximation of how I experienced this and, with my limited Japanese, pieced together the details of what the hell was going on.

When I flip to the channel, there are 6 girls and 1 guy on stage. The girls all look around 13-15 so they're probably 18-19 (you get used to the age-guessing arithmetic here after a while), all wearing uniform pink shirts with a slogan and something to do with a mermaid but the resolution and focus are inadequate to know more. The guy (perhaps 20) is rarely seen, and it doesn't take long to deduce that he's not the feature here, just the emcee. One of the girls has pulled the side of her skirt down enough that she can lift the waistband of her underwear to show to the camera, which obligingly zooms in for a closeup, then two of them hold up their skirts for the cameras to pan slowly across their undies for a few seconds. The camera zooms back out to a shot of the two girls obviously being featured (the other four hover in the background and don't warrant a microphone), and suddenly a family name comes up on screen below them (Kobayashi in Osaka or something like that). The two girls are given a magic marker, with which they write/draw on the shirts they're wearing for a few moments.

There is much applause for Kobayashi-san as two of the girls in the background step forward to accept large ziploc bags and hold them out for the featured girls. They, in turn, proceed to strip off their shirts and reach under their skirts to take off their underwear, which are all destined for the ziplocs. Someone in the studio takes a photo of them standing there topless, there is much applause, and they depart.

By this time I have pieced together a few more things from the intermittent glimpses of the t-shirts and banner:

• The shirts say "Stop!AIDS" [sic] - sounds more like a warning sign, doesn't it?


• The woman on the t-shirts I thought might be a mermaid is just standing in a giant condom


• This is the 2006 24-hour fundraiser - presumably for AIDS-related causes x, y and z

Two new girls come on, very briefly introduce themselves, give a hint of what they're wearing, and a CG banner slides onscreen. They say "Start!" (well, ok, "Staato") and a white-board is greenscreened into the bottom left corner of the screen with "24 yen" written on it (that's basically 24 cents, give or take a pittance). The last piece clicks into place: people are phoning in bids to get these girls' underwear! I didn't want to believe it when it first occurred to me, but this put the nails in the coffin, even though 24 yen has to be a joke. The girls continue to show their frilly bras and demonstrate that the panties you can buy are going to come straight off their bodies. All this while the bids keep coming in, and top out at 35,000 yen($350) when, for whatever reason, the bidding ends, which the generous So-and-so-san in Wherever won. There is much applause, and the Ziploc Strip begins again.

Some kind philanthropist shells out 50,000 yen for the next two girls' dainties, perhaps because one of them was too modest to show her panties to the camera while she was wearing them and would only show them to the emcee. Someone obligingly held a thin strip of paper in front of the camera when she had to lift her skirt a bit to take them off. (NB - they obviously weren't prepared for this possibility.)

I flipped back across this channel about half an hour later and the parade was still going.

Now I realize that it's largely my North American upbringing that makes my first instinct tell me there's something weird about topless young girls on early evening TV, and I try to look past that. They're adults and don't seem to be prostitutes or anything, just normal girls trying to raise some money for a good cause. What was really tough to wrap my head around was that the society here is so used to the idea of buying girls' freshly worn underwear that this probably didn't raise an eyebrow. It reminded me of the time a Japanese friend told me to call her "Yellow Monkey", and another responded to my astonishment with, "It's OK, we're all Japs here. And you guys are Limeys, and Yanks, and ...what do you say for Canadians, anyway?"(Good question. Canucks? Doesn't really have the same connotations.) Don't get me wrong, not having to tiptoe around the PC monster 24/7 is great, but I should think there is a line somewhere between calling consenting friends Japs and Yellow Monkeys and leering old men drooling with anticipation of the first whiff when they open their Ziploc bag full of hot-off-the-press underwear.

Am I just a prude?