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.

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!

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!

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.

Fuji-san

(Original post and comments here.)

This is the long-awaited blog exclusive abridged edition; you can find my absurdly detailed version at my otherwise useless geocities page.
And of course there's also Morgan and Maya's version. Don't ask which of them is the Fat Buddha, though; it might be a touchy subject.
PS - sorry about posting this half a dozen times, the formatting around the photos refuses to behave

So a while back I heard about a few of my coworkers planning to scale the Monster (aka the Fooj, aka Mt. Fuji) to watch the sunrise, so I decided to grab me a piece of that action, having missed out the first time around Nippon. The climb is not an uncommon feat, so I wasn't overly worried as I packed my junk and slapped on a pair of sneakers.

Morgan and Maya were going along too, and Morgan figured out that our itinerary made it pretty much impossible to make it to the top by the 5:03 sunrise... which would be a bit of a downer after climbing a mountain to watch the sunrise. So we (meaning he) did some legwork and found an alternate route that would allow us to complete the mission. It was a few hours longer commute and required trainhopping that made us feel like Frogger, but you only do this once, so you do it right, right? Right. ... Where was I?

Oh yeah. The Fuji Express, a beautifully painted train with legroom for 12 at every seat. This little gem afforded us some great views of Fuji while we bobbed and weaved through the little mountains approaching the one that gets almost as much action as Ms. Hilton. It's honestly pretty impressive as you approach, and I almost think even the Japanese engineers gave some consideration to the aesthetics when they designed the route. Unlikely I know, but it's just possible. Or it might be that a few peeks at the peak were unavoidable. It is pretty big. Considering that we were going during Obon, it was also nice to see that the train wasn't full of climbers. All the guidebooks warn that Obon is a bad time, what with every Japanese person taking advantage of the one holiday they more or less all get during climbing season, plus a flood of tourists and gaijin desperate to get the same pictures and postcards as all of their friends.

While waiting for our bus to depart from Kawaguchiko we picked up walking sticks, replenished our water reserves, and sat around on our thumbs. A good time was had by all, except maybe the anonymous lady blowing chunks in the powder room. The bus trip was a bit frightening, but by this point we all dozed, waiting for our 2nd wind to arrive. Ok, be honest, maybe 22nd (there were a lot of nuts in the trail mix).

We hang out at Gogome, the 5th station, for about an hour, psyching up, pigging out, zoning in, and so forth. What I find really great about the throng of climbers that rode up with us was that while some do their stretches and/or comment about the air being noticeably thinner, some are also having a quick smoke to prepare their lungs for the beating they're about to take. Virtually everyone who arrived at the same time as us also leaves within 15 minutes.

As I said, this is Station 5 (elevation 2,305m) of the actual climb. So when I say we climbed Fuji, I only mean we got to the top (3,776m) without a giant slingshot. We took a bus this far because the slope and the time involved to this point are just not worth it. By all accounts I've heard it's just a really loooong hike up to that point, and where's the drama in that? Where ya gonna get your "Save yourself!" and "Give me the ring!" moments on a long hike, huh? You won't, that's where. So we fast-forwarded to the good parts.

For the first couple of minutes after departing Station 5 (at 21:35) we think we've fast-forwarded way too far...we're heading downhill, and as omens go, we don't exactly need tea-leaves to know that's a bad thing. Fortunately, the trail gets its act together and we're soon going up. At the 6th Station (2,390m, 22:10ish) we're a bit ahead of schedule and feeling good about the climb, so after a short break we play a couple of sets of tennis and take a cooking class press on.

Pretty much the whole climb after that is a blur of darkness, trail mix, branding our walking sticks, and replacing flashlight batteries since I didn't think ahead like M&M did to get one of those stylish and adorable headlamps. I'm surprised how much of the climb has reinforced concrete shoring up the sides of the walking trails, or chicken wire forming the loose volcanic rock into steps, but to keep it "rugged and natural" (Japanese style) the trail itself is rarely paved. They don't go quite that far.

Probably the most memorable moment comes when Morgan figures out his wallet is missing, most likely dropped on the bus. Denial, anger, bargaining, etc; 2700+ metres up we have it all, but there's nothing to be done about the wallet till we get back down in any case, and dawn at the summit is coming with or without us, so on we go through the traffic jams and lineups, guided by other people's flashlights so much that I turn off my own for long segments of the climb. My feet are getting blisters, and long periods of mostly standing in line on the narrow trails is not helping me forget about them. It's actually a relief when the trail gets steeper and rockier because people are forced to spread out a bit more and I can concentrate on something more interesting than my aching legs and the faces and voices of the people we keep leapfrogging because they rest anywhere they want while we take our breathers at the stations. You know, the way civilized folk do.

One other thing that sticks out is hearing one of the other gaijin near me get late-night cranky to his friends about the Japanese people behind us. They keep saying, "Sugoi" (in this case, roughly meaning 'wow') about every 5 seconds. Once you live here for a while, that word basically fades into the background noise because it's so versatile and overused. After Jo Schmo points it out, though, it comes back to the surface and I start noticing it every time. Plus I have lots of time to think back over the last segment or so of the climb and my mental replay is peppered with 'sugoi' too. So now I'm hearing it double and getting late-night cranky about it myself. Perfect. When Morgan leads a surge forward to get away from that cluster I'm only too happy to follow.

As we ascend, the traffic gets more and more backed up and I can't help but note how Japanese this whole little pilgrimage is turning out. You just don't get this kind of problem on the other famous mountains of the world, I should think. There were literally thousands of people all told. From maybe 15 or so to around 60, everybody was getting a little Fuji action. On the way down we even saw a guy carrying a small spaniel and leading his young daughter. Has anyone seen this kind of thing on Kilimanjaro?

		Finally, after a long period of concern about the lightening eastern sky and whether we'd make it in time, at 04:45 we reach the top, pass through the symbolic gate, find a slightly less crowded spot, and stop dead in our tracks. tadaaaaaaaaaa....! We're not about to move anytime soon and we start frantically snapping photos of where the sun will be when it gets its lazy butt outta bed, still 15 minutes off. To be fair, the cloudscape is pretty spectacular and along with everyone else there except possibly the tour guides and shop staff, we already know we'll never see this in person again. When the sun finally pokes out from behind the cloud horizon, there is bountiful if tired cheering, a bit of singing, and a deafening sustained chorus of shutter clicks. Eventually, though, we've stared at and posed in front of and clicked on everything in sight, and we proceed up the last few steps to where the crowd has more or less gotten stuck: the mall. There's no Walmart there yet, but on top of Fuji there is a string of shops for souvenirs, soup (re: everything else: "No, we've run out of that"), engravings, omemori, etc. Even the bathroom is a business, and at 200 yen a visit I think they're doing alright. There are 10 toilets and 5 urinals, and I still wait in line for at least half an hour.
Click for larger versions

There's also the crater, conveniently located between us and the weather station on the far side, at the actual highest point. It's about a half hour walk there, which means a half hour walk back, which means we take the obligatory snaps and fuggedaboudit. We're going home. But that becomes an ordeal in itself.