tokyobold

What's Happening Right Now

2007-09-29T03:54:00.000-07:00

I'm in a hotel in Osaka and here's what's on TV:

Japan's shortest man is sitting on the lap of Japan's tallest man, watching a guy do magic tricks.

More on that later, I guess.

Moments Like Those

2007-09-16T05:50:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you see a stranger do something and you get this big feeling in your guts like the random thing that you've just seen is a complete summary of what is going on with that person.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, think again, because actually you'll find that you DO know what I'm talking about.

Anyway I was thinking about that after my first visit to a Japanese video/DVD rental shop yesterday. Aya took me there to get some movies since that's the sort of thing couples do when otherwise short of inspiration. This was a local shop, not a major chain - I forget the name but their store mascot was Christopher Columbus for some reason.

(What We Rented:
National Treasure - what the "Da Vinci Code" movie might've been if it had attempted to be interesting or fun. How's Nick Cage's elocution though... it's like he's balancing an invisible coin on his chin and is therefore afraid to open his mouth too much when talking.
Tremors - one of the cool things about dating a girl from another culture is that you can say "OMG YOU'VE NEVER SEEN TREMORS" and then make her watch Tremors.)

Like most entertainment venues in Tokyo, it had a couple of pachinko machines and a couple of slot machines in it, ancillary to its main purpose but nonetheless as necessary as toilets. Apart from myself, Aya, and the staff, there was one guy there, alone on a Saturday night, hitting up the pokies in a video store. I noticed him when he paused from playing to angrily stomp a cockroach that had been scuttling around at his feet. And that was one of those moments - the surroundings, his purpose, his crappy track suit pants, the exaggerated fury he vented on the roach, all said to me: "Here is the Sum of this Man"

i mean if you wanted to play pachislo why not go here, was he not man enough for the Big League

Of course, I realize that it's completely unfair to think that way. And I'm forced to wonder if and when this has happened to me - what unguarded moments have summed me up for people who will never see me again - in the street, yanking at a stuck zipper, flying half mast and failing to balance a coffee in my free hand as it spatters against the T-shirt that I've put on backwards and inside-out - "Well, there's THAT guy's life..."

Doggs, think about it and tell me what kind of moments like this you have had if you can be real about it.

Other observations:
- The porn in Japanese video stores is not segregated from the regular movies?!? When pointed this out to Aya, she explained that the "real porn" was upstairs... given that the stuff that was shelved alongside the collected works of Sean Connery was unambiguously hardcore, I can only surmise that the Real Deal is some kind of parade formation synchronized jackhammer anal with a cast of thousands, retrieved perhaps from a secret Nazi research base in Antarctica. (Fear and only fear prevented me from going upstairs to check).

- There's a whole lot of American direct-to-video releases available in Japan that I've never dared to imagine might exist?

"Snake Train" - a terrible train crash occurs when the 9:15 collides with a giant snake.
The snake was "pretty angry" but otherwise unaffected.

I am tantalized by the prospect of watching them and making fun of them, but scared of the ten-year regression in my psyche that would represent.

1 Year Anniversary

2007-08-03T06:26:00.000-07:00

Today is the first anniversary of my arrival in Japan. Obviously, since I'm updating at home updating the blogg, I'm not celebrating tonight.

However, tomorrow I'll be hitting up the Ichikawa fireworks display, just as I did in the first weekend of August 2006, and this time instead of sitting on the riverbank alone, I'll be going with some good friends and a nice girl who kisses me sometimes. So in terms of progress, that's pretty tangible I suppose.

Here's a quick review of the year in incomplete sentences.

Things eaten:
Guts
Compressed Rice
Pig Uterus
Fish Spoof
Spinal Cord
Mince Slime w/Noodles
Marmite On Toast
1x Large Whelk (excluding Shell)

Skills got:
Speak Slowly
Catch Trains
Level 1 Linguist
Swim (Basic)
+1 to Wisdom
-1 to Fatness
Operate Inter Net
Identify
Bowling (Accuracy)
Bowling (Power)
Bowling (Finesse)
Bowling (SPECIAL ABILITY: Rhino Storm)
Speak To Americans
Imaginary Friend

Equipped:
Same 3 Shirts I Had When I Got Here, Plus Those $10 Hallensteins Shorts
Stubble
Fan
Tiny Dictionary of Inadequacy
Triceratops Trucker Cap

Disappointments:
Didn't write enough.
Didn't draw enough.
Didn't make enough music.
Didn't learn bugger all Japanese, really.
Still basically a bit of a lazy prick no matter what country I happen to be in.

All up, it has been a decent year, and far preferable to the hypothetical alternative in which I remained in NZ, earned reams of cash, and spent all my time gnawing on myself wondering about what I might be doing instead. So, yay for me, et cetera. If you have a choice between going to a strange country and not going to a strange country, my advice is to go to a strange country.

Un Livre Dont VOUS Etes Le Heros

2007-07-17T05:53:00.000-07:00

Things of note today:

1) Manda Overboard has made an important stand against circumcision... and at no point does she compare the uncircumcised penis to a sea slug. It's nice to know of ONE lady that doesn't bring that up.

Apparently circumcision does make you better at not getting AIDS though.

After following the men for a year, the researchers found that for every 10 uncircumcised men in the study who became infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, only an estimated three circumcised men contracted the virus, the newspaper reported.

The study is considered significant because scientists have yet to discover an effective vaccine against the HIV virus or develop a reliable way to prevent infection other than through abstinence or safe-sex practices.

At last, an effective alternative to the jimmy hat: FETCH ME THE SHEARS MOMMA, I AIN'T WEARIN' NO GUNNY SACK!!!

Seriously though fellers, how many terrible rap b-sides do you need to hear before you just put a lid on that thing?

CONCLUSION: A man's junk is like roast chicken, though it may be less healthy, it's better with the skin left on.

2) Weird medical clip art... I found this stuff weeks ago while looking for reference material for drawing, and I've been meaning to bring it up ever since.

Mainly, I just wanted to know how to draw "child voluntarily drinking an activated charcoal slurry":

Child voluntarily drinking an activated charcoal slurry

The work in the LifeART collection may be stilted and weird-looking, but it's the captions that really transport it upon a lofty ledge of artistic merit, from which vantage it pisses down upon the likes of Dali, setting him cussing and spluttering, and wilting his stupid gimmick moustache, eerily and precisely after the exact fashion of one the ridiculous melting clocks in his banal, meritless paintings.

I present now a gallery of favourites:

Infant lying on back without diaper; adult left hand lifts both legs
while right hand cleanses baby's bottom with clean cloth

Injury occurs when excessive axial traction is placed across the elbow joint; illustration shows child holding hand of woman and beginning to fall with elbow of free hand extended

And who could forget this classic health science scenario?

One teenager smoking marijuana while another is injecting a drug into his arm

"Ah, that old chestnut!", I hear you exclaim. Finally, a personal favourite:

Stuttering child trying to talk to peers

3) I recently systematized my Flickr into a set of categories that can encompass anything sufficiently corporeal to be visible on camera. Linnaeus can eat a dick! I have uploaded a few photos recently, so if you like buildings and mildly amusing Japanese signs check it out. I'm gonna try and catch up on my photo uploads, I've still got a backlog.

Tune in next time for the first in an ongoing series: "Fighting Fantasy: Memoires of YOU" (alternative title: "Of Skellingtons and T-Junctions: The Long Hard Road to Page 400")

I'm sure they're tired of the obvious questions by now.

Sometimes Japan is Pretty Decent

2007-07-07T19:13:00.000-07:00

Yeeesssssss!

Healthy and Pre-occupied

2007-06-22T05:15:00.000-07:00

Well, it's either rained or been disgustingly dishrag humid pretty constantly since the last post in which I declared that the rainy season was cancelled. Chalk another one up to Man's Folly.

One of the Things that apparently Happens when you work for a Japanese corporation is that you go and get a health check, and since I now have a full-time, non-teaching job, that's what I did today.

(The above has been added to "Sentences To Not Start Your Novel With.DOC")

It was more comprehensive than I expected. They X-rayed my lungs. They tested my eyesight and hearing (in a cursory fashion - the test had a total of four tones, not counting any that I was possibly deaf to). They even stuck thingies on my bare chest like was done to E.T. and Elliot. All up it was very much like the first 42 seconds of the video for "In Da Club".

I've never had a real medical check-up before, so I was quite expecting to look at the lung X-ray and see Lucifer's face like in the 9/11 smoke. Happily, there was only two dark smudges that I'm told represent lungs that are normal - perhaps even boring. An off-white smear indicated that my heart is of a size "within normal limits, though possibly mean-spirited". Basically everything was normal and healthy-ish - barring results from the blood and piss tests that I await like a sailor's wife. The only nasty surprise is that I'm two centimetres shorter than I've been telling everyone for the past year: HEIGHT FRAUD. So, everyone: I could be alive for a while - adjust your plans accordingly.

Tune in next time for an in-depth and scornful analysis of David Bowie's 1985 hit "Magic Dance".

What kind of magic spell to use???

Summer in Tokyo Will Always Remind Me of Hotness and Buildings

2007-06-21T05:41:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the machinations of that wily old trollop La Nina, rainy season appears to have been cancelled, here in the Kanto region at least. But the city is still hot and humid, and suffused with an old, wrinkled scent - the smell of things that have been used, over and over again, by thousands of people - a smell that always reminds me of the first time I came here and went "coo it's not like Parnell is it".

Strangers in strange lands are inevitably moved to express themselves in the medium of overwrought, ill-advised metaphorical language. I am no exception. In fact I'm probably a good example - even a classic! - and I could well be used for cautionary, educational purposes - to warn young kids off thesauruses perhaps - or thesaurii - did we ever settle that one? Oops - I ended the sentence already - there was more to be said there I feel.

So I duly set out to inflict a description upon Tokyo's summer perfume, these hints of shit and ginger that furnish me with strange and not unpleasant nostalgia. I thought I'd start with the basic idea that Tokyo is a big set of lungs that I'm walking around inside. However, extending the metaphor, that would make ME maybe 1) some dust (BORING!!!) or 2) a disgusting lung parasite, which is possibly quite apt but could lead to rather more self-examination than I'm prepared for right now - thus, I abandoned the metaphor.

So anyway the main idea was that I reckon it's pretty hot and wet inside lungs most of the time and the same is true of Tokyo.

My back-up LURID METAPHOR emerged fully-formed and naked in the world during a chat session with Amanda, and here it is:

me: it is a complicated smell that requires recourse to ever more lurid metaphors to describe
basically every surface in the city is slightly warm and slightly damp and is exuding its essence into a great urban potpourri, where the dried flowers are concrete thinly laminated in the wax of human generations, and the curly bits of coloured bark are cats with face-ulcers
Amanda: Dude
me: potpourri usually comes in a basket so i guess the basket would be Sin

Amanda is in Kyushu of course, where the rainy season is fully functional - enthusiastic, even! The misery of two weeks constant rain shall only be compounded when an enormous convoy of trucks arrives from Tokyo, and bears all their fresh water away to offset our impending drought.

Anyway! There is another thing that happens when it gets hot, apart from me sweating and also overstretching my slight abilities as a writer and snapping all the tendons in my writing bone or whatever the hell I'm trying to say. Namely: people open all their windows. Consequently I have become a member of my neighbour's lives as they reside but four inches away. Right now I can hear someone splashing around in a bath and someone else chopping up something on a chopping board - hold on - yeah, sounds like carrot. And THEY in turn are listening to me listening to Nas and typing things.
Toyko is crowded and it's the biggest city in the world and sometimes I really realize this. However this social disaster is neatly defused by the fact that my neighbours are all humble, quiet living people of a kind mainly found here in Japan, and I am doubtless far more of a nuisance to them than they to I. As one night during my recent trip home attested, it doesn't matter how big your section is if your neighbours are P-smoking maniacs.

(Sudden, shuddering thought: a union of New Zealand's legion of P-smoking maniacs, with Japan's ready supply of "SAMURAI SWORDS"?????? Let's pray that the endless churn of continental drift never squidges these nations together)

Speaking of such, and finally, and most importantly, and lest we forget -- last but not least, allow me to add -- last but not least: what's up to everyone back in NZ. I had a mad decent trip and it was crazy way too short but as they say in "That's Life" magazine: "Life is suffering".

Seriously, it was great to see so many friends and family that I'd missed and realize that by the simple expedient of vanishing for ten months you can make everyone forget anything bad about you. Hooray!

Situation Update, and, Ninjas: Where Are They Now?

2007-06-04T04:46:00.000-07:00

Here's what's happening now:

1) I'm going back to NZ for a little under two weeks, flight is tomorrow! I'm looking forward to coffee, meat pies, and people I ain't seen in too long (if you're reading, you may be one of them: hi!).

2) I've got a new job writing academic materials... as Shakespeare was to ignoring grammar and making up words, I shall be to illustrating the difference between present perfect tense and present perfect PROGRESSIVE tense.

DIGRESSION:
Grammar quiz!
What's the difference in meaning between the following statements:
"I have lived in Tokyo for ten months."
"I have been living in Tokyo for ten months."

Answers to Comments section please! If you have a good explanation, I will show it to my boss and you can come take my job off me.

DIGRESSION: Abort Phase

3) After my holiday I gotta go through a visa application process that rivals childbirth in its extravagent levels of pain, struggle, and sheer rigmarole.

4) I received a few gifts from some of my students in my last week or so of work, such as a Winnie the Pooh soap and flannel gift set, and some chewing gum. Best of all, however, was a book about ninjas. Consequently I have been thinking about ninjas in a serious way again, despite their return to a state of cultural overexposure in recent years (i.e. once again they are PRETTY PLAYED OUT doggs).

So next time I have a chance to visit the Kansai area I intend to visit Iga and Koga, home to the two main ninja krews of antiquity.

In modern times, the Iga school appear to have diversified from spying and assassinations, and now provide workshops and team-building exercises for those in the corporate world. Check the practical advice on the website... how to reduce stress the ninja way.

I have a backlog of photos I ought to flickerize... most of them dating back to the time of Mum and Dad's visit. Some more have been uploaded tonight.

Well I Went On A Rolly Coaster

2007-05-23T22:52:00.000-07:00

One of the advantages of a timid, unadventurous childhood is that it bequeaths a trove of new experiences for your adult years, when you might otherwise become jaded.

Until last Friday, I had never been on a rolly coaster (or "jet coaster" as they are known here, it being somewhat sadistic to expect Japanese folks to pronounce "roller"). Thus, rather than losing my rolly coaster cherry to a venerable bucket at Rainbow's End in Manukau, I was ravished instead by "Eejanakai", which is based on pretty recent technology (its only the second of its kind) and currently holds the Guiness Record for greatest number of inversions (14).

(The record, incidentally, is not recognized by everyone since there are only three times that the actual track turns upside-down. The remaining eleven are "seat inversions" since the seats, terrifyingly, can swivel and tip you about independently. Yes, the roller coaster community has politics and controversies all their own, and apparently a "Supreme Council", and probably also a handshake - who knew?)

Some external footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CN6OnGyUnmo
And, point-of-view footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkrFWtvQkYc

So, uh, it was pretty scary. Partway through the ride they have a speed camera that takes snaps of you amidst the experience, and you can buy them on your way out. Mine looked like a promotional image for "Faces of Death 4" - the words "abject" and "terror" are often combined in a loose and cliched way but here their union is entirely appropriate. Of the twenty people on the ride, I was visibly the most terrified, and in the manner most abject. Moreover the wind pressure had caused my shorts to ride up, exposing great pallid flanks of pearly, goose-pimpled thigh. I am not normally a fan of any photos of myself not taken in accordance with the strictest principles of MySpace composition (camera at arm's length, three-quarter profile, artificially quizzical expression, about ninety takes). So I didn't buy that one. It lacked... dignity.

Nevertheless the whole thing was pretty exhilirating. I would ride that machine again if I ever went back to Fuji Q Highland, and the queue was less than thirty minutes long (i.e. probably never). And I was able to comport myself in a somewhat more manly fashion when I rode Fujiyama later in the day. It's an older machine of more traditional design, but nevertheless a pretty respectable old scoot. At one time it had the record for highest peak, but has since been superceded. I guess it maybe remains in the top ten.

Here's some entertaining footage of a dude singing karaoke while riding Fujiyama: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUi44hl-P5I

Inter Net Strikes Out Again

2007-05-14T01:29:00.000-07:00

Shucks, so I was in a pretty foul mood earlier today and I put "www.ihateeverything.com" into my browser. I don't think I expected anything in particular - perhaps a Wikipedia of peeves, disproportionate hostility to the various contents of the world? Some vitriolic screed on the inadequacy of paperclips as a tool for attaching papers (papers! how I loathe them!), and also white people: god damn them?

Basically you would expect this picture and a Trent Reznor MIDI

But here's what you actually get:

The same kind of fake search engine non-content you get when you accidentally type "yhoo" instead of Yahoo. My mood, however, was slightly improved when I troubled to read the software's rather nonsensical attempts to exploit my obvious nihilistic urges and get me downloading some spyware or whatever.

Here's what's "hot":

Some of is just the kind of stuff that the internet exists for - nude pictures of middle-aged women, theft of copyrighted media, dating... "hate" and "hate crimes" obviously fall under the remit of "hating everything" and are pretty justifiable. But... "hobo"?

Hobo

Some things are "hot" and others are "popular":

"I hate music, Indian woman!" is a coherent sentence that I intend to deploy some day, at an appropriate moment.

"Life Blows" could refer to the idea that Life is metaphorically eating a dick, or alternatively the Blows dealt by Life to unfortunate folks, the kind of blows that might ultimately lead a person to hate a number of things. Both of these are sentiments that someone who really hates everything can get behind so I clicked on it.

More of the same:

The encyclopedia article about "life blows" does not exist, however that particular phrase does occur in their articles titled "no doubt", "Precordial thump" and "Welcome to the Infant Freebase" (seriously).

Who are these people? What is their business model? Who is paying to advertise with them? What does it cost, like, thirty cents?

One answer to the last question is "people who sell components of furniture but not actually entire pieces of furniture", which is what you get if you click on "Knobs" (disappointing for some, I suppose).

How could this possibly be effective in any way. "I hate everything but mainly the fact that I can't open my drawers anymore because the things on the front that you grip have fallen off... dang what do you call those things, godammit I'm so frustrated I just gotta hit up ihateeverything.com and see what's there".... is this a sentence that would conceivably pass through someone's mind.

No, it is not. (It was a rhetorical question)

I WOULD NOT PAY FOR THIS SERVICE WITH ZIMBABWE MONEY

Strung Out On Caffeinated Breath Mints

2007-05-12T08:22:00.000-07:00

Some months ago a minor scandal emerged when a small cabal of Nova teachers were busted for dealing cocaine. Lacking the underworld connections and fabulous salary of a Nova position, I have fallen prey to a more modest addiction - "Dry Hard" caffeinated breath mints.

It's a common weakness in my profession. Dry Hard neutralizes the milky gaijin breath with which we might otherwise drench our students - moreover the caffeine dose keeps the eyelids up as they struggle through a third conditional. Like soldiers dosed on ephedrine however, what begins as pragmatic use ends in a enslavement to sordid cravings - one colleague, holidaying in Thailand, took ten packs with him least he be struck with "Fugu Mouth", a putative and probably fictitious withdrawal syndrome. It's all a bit sad considering the Dry Hard's pay-off is a burning sensation in your mouth and a imperceptible buzz equivalent to an eyedropper full of Nescafe.

Another brand in the Mintia range - "Morning Spear" - has been exploited by lovers of rudeness to employ the phrase: "Would you like a suck of my Morning Spear?". (Never by me of course - though I have been guilty of referring to "Dry Harder" and "Dry Hard: With A Vengeance" in the very specific occasion that I must beg Dry Hard from another user three times in the same day. Someone needs to put me in a weighted sack and drown me like a kitten, I know).

Moving on from all that bollocks, the hottest thing in Tokyo streets right now is a fusion of jump-rope and breaking - Japanese folks are typically pretty diligent in the practice of their hobbies so the performances are usually of a high standard... witness here. Flair bartending may also be making a comeback, or at least some fellers were practicing in Yoyogi Park last time I was there. Somehow, Japanese men can do it without appearing to be douchebags.

Also I might go to this.

On the Seaons...

2007-05-02T07:18:00.000-07:00

After Spring's first blossom, Summer's first roach must come.

Let today mark that day.
Let this hour, mark that hour.

Little bastard has plenty of cover but I can move furniture if it comes to that.
I can OVERTURN.

Electioneering

2007-04-23T09:04:00.000-07:00

The metropolitan elections ended yesterday... this is as merciful as the coming of Spring. The past week saw an escalating tumult of Tokyo-style electioneering that culminated in me losing a sock because I was so agitated that I tore it off my foot and threw it across the room and now I can't find it. It's hard to throw a sock far without bunching it up pretty tight, so I'm not sure how I contrived to lose it but I guess that's politics.

It is generally accepted in Tokyo that the best way to relay information to the public is by yelling at them through a megaphone - the busy commercial districts ring with the shouts of touts, sometimes as many as four or five outside a single storefront. They often experiment with wild variations in pitch and volume, though it's not clear whether this is intended to crack the public's unassailable ability to ignore stimuli, or to relieve their own boredom. (They have been known to keen and ullulate, modes of expression formerly restricted to "things being described by H.P. Lovecraft").

This is a pretty tolerable practice once you're accustomed to it. One does not go to Shibuya to stroll about doing maths problems in one's head, after all. In election season however, the practice extends to every part of the city. Nowhere remains unmolested as volunteers mobilize in support of their preferred candidate. The main streets are worked by small cars - roofs buckling under the weight of speakers, ladies dressed like the Queen Mother (RIP) wave gloved hands at pedestrians and chatter into mics. No-one waves back, or reacts at all if they can help it... the seasoned Tokyo citizen effortlessly deflects all incomings, like Daniel-san pretending to wash a car window.

Narrower streets, such as that on which I live, are visited instead by small parades of supporters in headbands and fluorescent windbreakers, armed with banners and loudhailers. Occasionally the actual candidate will accompany these parades - identifiable by a different colour windbreaker and a look of replete satisfaction on their faces. I even saw one women bellowing away with her PA aimed into a tiny alleyway flanked by just three doors.

There are certain parts of these tirades that I can understand and they do not vary much. I will attempt a translation (for this example, I am imagining that there is a politician named "Tanaka")

"He's Tanaka!"
"Let's have a good relationship! (with Tanaka)"
"Good relationship, please!"
"Tanaka! Tanaka! He's Tanaka. (I can say his name in a variety of tones!)"

(repeat until out of earshot... as the old story ends, "and for all I know, they may be yelling still")

I have no idea what the issues were in this election (suppression of touts and hawkers, anyone?) - there is some suggestion that a sum of 10,000,000,000 yen may be missing, or required, or at stake, or is desired by some person or persons, or you can buy Odaiba for that amount... I dunno.

Anyway it's over and I'm glad. I belatedly noticed that some of the election posters are pretty amusing and I have put some up on the flickers with mildly acidic commentary. I feel no shame in gently ridiculing these strangers as there's every chance that at least one of them woke me up while I was trying to sleep off a hangover on Saturday morning.

MKD

PS: This is now the #1 hit for "Murray Dixon" on Google Japan - run it through a translation engine if you feel you'd like to become more confused.

Mystical Fortune Update

2007-04-16T04:59:00.000-07:00

Well, I took the folks up to Nikko today, a place about 150km or so north of Tokyo, up in the hills. The tomb of Tokugawa Ieyasu is located there, and it's a World Heritage Site... now having spent a few days in Kyoto, one can get a little jaded about World Heritage Sites, National Treasures, Designated Important Cultural Properties, etc. Sometimes it seems all you gotta do to get registered is stick a crappy bird on the roof of your temple. Baby, it don't even got to be gold.

However, Nikko is the bidniz. I recommend it - the buildings are exceptional and, to my knowledge, no-one has burned them down yet (most historical buildings in Japan are reconstructions... the famous Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji) in Kyoto for example, was most recently burned down by a buck-wild monk in 1950, but had been razed and rebuilt at least four or five times prior to that). Moreover, the temples and shrines at Nikko are set amidst towering, grand old cedar trees - you expect to see an Ewok in a kimono at any moment... that's scarcely a recommendation I suppose - let me re-assure you, no Ewoks were observed. (Though one fanciful carving of an elephant bore a passing resemblance to "Watto" the annoying thingy from Episode One who was apparently supposed to be a Jew or an Italian or something).

Photos will be up on the flickarz in due course (I have taken a bungload since getting my new camera and it will take a while to sort out what's worth uploading and what ain't).

Anyway, I also have a new fortune (see the old one here), procured at Rinnoji Temple.

Your Fortune: Excellent (result!)

Everything you want to do can be done well. No problem in your family.

(I like to read this as "No problem in YOUR family!!! ...many problems are implied in the families of others)

Wish: Everything goes as you expect. You can sell or buy any house, any land.
Expected Visitor: He(or she) will come very soon.
Missing Thing: Keep calm and look around with patience.
Travel: Business trip will do good.
Business: All right, but be cool.
Study: No problem. Continue studying.
Speculation: Just wait, or you'll lose.
Game and Match: You will surely win. Be calm.
Love: Get along with your partner faithfully.
Removal: No problem. (This may refer to tumours)
Childbirth: Don't worry.
Illness: Be faithful, and it will soon be cured.
Marriage Proposal: Leave it to others. You can realize it.

oh

2007-04-06T05:48:00.000-07:00

i feel like i oughtta have a bunch to say after a long period of silence but hell you know what NOT REALLY

don't wanna get started complaining about how 70s bands that i liked keep rolling up to Tokyo and doing Vegas type shows for upwards of 8000 yen... i can't be investing that type of bank on the off-chance that they haven't started sucking in the last 30 years... (YEAH I'm looking at you "Cold Blood" but you ain't alone)

anyway i got at least one gig to look forward to

my folks is here and that is alright. there's a certain confidence that a man can only obtain and renew by showing off to his mother. so i'm feeling fresh in that regard. plus they are spoiling me rotten and got me a new camera and 6 (count 'em!?!) kilograms of extra dark chocolate..... yeah apparently it was on special. i suppose a fondue party may be immanent, or else i gotta develop some new fetish. i don't know what else can realistically be done with that amount of chocco

let me re-iterate NEW CAMERA: so there will be new flickrs pretty soon -- i mean what happened to our flickr scene, doggies -- who'd have known i was the heart and soul all along?

ALRIGHT MY SKINWALKERS maybe more later i never really know whats i'm gonna do next (just what i probably won't)

Rise and Shine, Twenty-Nine

2007-03-28T08:48:00.000-07:00

well that is my age now, the two and the nine

right now i am eating peanuts that still have the skins on them and the skins are just driving me berserk. godammit they are a bane....

still, a birthday don't start 'fishially none tills i wake up in the morning so i reckon we'll not take having a bunch of manky skins stuck in my teeth as the measure of the day

i ain't sure which year exactly my birthday became less about presents and more about contemplating my inevitable demise but it were a few years afore this one - lucky i ain't prone to fussing about such

anyway, proper update soon doggies

El Delfin's 9/11 Tribute

2007-03-08T18:11:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I feel bad about just posting YouTube links and stuff, but you know, what is the point of a blogg really? The answer is "not much" or at least it would be if English grammar allowed that to be an answer.

So, ain't no need act prideful about being just another molecule caught up in the Brownian swirl of inter net soup, pushing around a bunch of pictures of people's faces all phoshopped on the wrong bodies and that.

Anyway.

Here's an Ecuadorian pop star's musical tribute to 9/11 (is anyone out there rabid enough to demand I say 11/9 instead?)... it is pretty astonishing.

Ay yi yi!

(I ain't saying "Ay yi yi!" to act ill about Latin people. I'm quoting, he says it at least a couple of times. It is a genuine expression of shock and woe. Also his lounge looks like it belongs to a character in a Tomas Tang film)

Read the translated lyrics afterwards... posted up by Vice Magazine, which, incidentally, is probably a better place to be looking for content than right here.

Gut's Soul

2007-03-06T22:06:00.000-08:00

I went to "Gut's Soul" last night, an all-you-can-eat yakiniku restaurant in Yoyogi. Infinite fried meat for 90 minutes - 900 yen. That is outrageously cheap. In fact the owners seem to be kind of embarrassed about the situation. The interior walls are covered in messages written in chalk. There is basic information like "what is yakiniku?" (my doggs - it is delicious marinated meat that you fry on a griddle that's set in the middle of your table), or advertising facts of dubious utility (fried pig meat has less cholesterol than egg yolks! EGG YOLKS -- BUSTED)

Much of the script, however, seems directly designed to shame the customer for coming to Gut's Soul. For example:

You can take as much as you like. You may be full. But don't forget to appreciate the farmer. You know that there is a lot of children who cannot get enough foods and starved in the world. So you should show appreciation for the food.

Or, more cryptically:

We have had a manner of culture for some hundreds of years. Now we have become rich and have no opportunity to learn this manner. So we introduced such a system as "you can eat as much as you want". We want you to think about the importance of food through this system. It's so excellent for you to learn something from our motto.

I think the point in this second piece is that our ancestors would've considered Gut's Soul an abombination.

Also: comic is updated.

Not Dead Yet

2007-02-27T08:22:00.000-08:00

Well, I didn't die at the swimming pool though I was forced to realize that my level of physical fitness is perhaps best described as "abject". However it should be a fun way to exercise and additionally a useful addition to a dude's Apocalypse Skillset so I will go back. How's chlorine in your eyes though? I had forgotten about that shit. Dude... it's chronic.

Flickarz have been quiet lately as my camera doesn't really recharge anymore, though by utilizing massage techniques normally employed only in the relief of acute prostatitis I was able to eke out enough juice for a couple more photos, and those are up now (SPOILER: dead snake in a jar of booze!).

Plus the comic is updated with a pretty basic part 1 of a 2 part thingy (naturally I have broken the site once again in the course of updating it). Keith has sent an email to Lil Jon and you can read it.

Unbelievably, some folks don't know who Lil Jon is - maybe too busy sitting in a darkened room editing the Wikipedia article on cryptography or something. For the benefit of those and others, I submit the following as a crash course in understanding the latest comic... also as evidence that Western society has indeed abandoned any notion of policing the influences to which children are exposed:

LET'S GO

Inter Net is a Magical Resource and It Knows What to Do

2007-02-25T18:13:00.000-08:00

I'm gonna go for a swim today in what may be the first instalment of a period of regular exercise. Swimming a proper stroke is a long lapsed skill (maybe last attempted when I was 13 or 14?) so I expect this outing to be somewhat embarassing... I just said to the inter net "okay so how does a dude swim again" so I could maybe get reminded about how much moves to do with my arms and soforth.

Here's what swimmer71holler has to say about the freestyle:

when swimming this stroke you want to pull the water while gliding through the water and when you swim the 50 meters this helps to but don't forget that kick

okay don't forget that kick fellers LET'S GO

( might do a comic today if i don't drown)

My Fortune, From Kamakura - Found While Packing Up

2007-02-17T21:22:00.000-08:00

ILLNESS: If you take care of yourself, you will recover.
PREASURE: You will have your desire fulfilled.
THE PERSON YOU AWAIT: He will comes if you are honest.
LOST ITEM: Looking for the item that you lost.
LAW SUITS: You will win.
QUARREL: You will win.
BUILDING / MOVING: Favorable if you are honest.
MARRIAGE: Will go well.
TRAVEL: Favorable.
LIFE AND DEATH: You will be alive if you are honest.
BUYING/SELLING: Favorable
TOOL: Ink stone, abacus

Stevie Wonder Was Very Excellent My Doggs

2007-02-17T06:47:00.000-08:00

Well, the concert was at this place called the Saitama Super Arena, which may give you some indication of its size. We didn't have the best seats exactly, but having seen recent photos of Stevie I was able to work out which barely discernable shape roughly corresponded to his body.

Actually I exaggerate the distance, and the view didn't matter overmuch anyways. He played for about two hours and the set list was better than I dared to hope for. We are talking about 85% real joints to 15% songs that are kinda soft. I thought about doing another pie chart but I think most people know what 85% looks like?

Anyway there was so much realness. Dude's voice seems as supple and beautiful as ever. Though he is kind of fat now, which is awesome, and completely within his mandate. Stevie Wonder has every right to be fat. Why did you bring it up you jerk.

So yeah... I am Stevied up in a big way right now. I'm ready. Do not say some bull crap about Stevie to me. I will slap you and have any novels you may have written banned from school libraries by the Board of Education.

HERE IS A PICTURE I MADE OF ME AND STEVIE

[WOAH the picture was kind of getting more disturbing every time i looked at it so i took it away, sorry]

oh shit of course

2007-02-15T08:53:00.000-08:00

oh yeah and here's the bit from kickboxer where van damme gets wasted and starts dancing

how could i forget

Omens, Portents: The Seasons Revolve, For Perhaps A Smidgen Longer Yet

2007-02-15T07:42:00.000-08:00

Well, winter may be drawing to a close here in Japan. Precocious, rowdy ume blossoms are out already, though the temperature has not risen all that appreciably. Generally they are disdained as being poor cousins of the sakura and just basically too damn eager.

I was extremely terrified of the Japanese winter before I came here, but this year at least it largely consisted of dry, sunny, calm days with nice soft light and vague blue shadows. The cold I would generously describe as "enlivening". In retrospect, I rather liked it.

Even as the season turns, so too my fortunes. On Monday I'll move into my new digs in Rad Dudez Town - never again to step off the train on a Saturday night to be greeted by the tell-tale smell of shit - another Fertilizer Night in Futawamukodai (roughly a fortnightly event). This has been a nice wee home base for me, but if I wanted to live in the countryside I could live in the countryside in New Zealand, a place where the countryside is extremely much less crappy. I'm hoping I'll see less people with kumara-size scalp tumours in Rad Dudez Town too but I suppose I'm really just keeping my fingers crossed on that one.

What's more, I saw a Japanese woman today that had a nice arse. NO REALLY.

Now, I don't want to be crass about this, but... I ain't been seeing enough decent arses. It is a fact. I am not really A Arse Dude, or even a man that considers the concepts of "A Tit Dude" and "A Arse Dude" as entirely useful in describing the world, but I have come to realize that I have a definite preference in the matter of A Girl's Bum and it is waaaaaaaay out on the rarefied rightmost reaches of the bell curve in Japan. So I have been feeling a lack... it is like living in a country where there's no orange. You could live a pretty satisfying life without the colour orange, I suppose. But you would miss it and maybe you would think about it a lot more than people normally do, if you get me. So after six months it was a pretty staggering thing for me for me to see this bum - this missing colour! - to see a bum with that kind of righteous geometry. Let me state that this was not an especially pervey experience for me. The satisfaction I obtained from witnessing this great thing was clear, lucid... empyreal! It was like the satisfaction of a dude straight up solving a hardcore maths equation. A saucy, wanton equation, an equation that has longed defied him! A tricky kind of equation. Today I feel like a man who knows the value of x, and possibly also the rate at which x is changing. I hope in my heart that she was not merely equipped an extremely well designed incontinence diaper.

Aaaaand, the other thing that pleases me is that I'm going to see Stevie Wonder play on Saturday. I'm hoping he will mainly bust out the reeeeeeal joints (and also "Part Time Lover").

Here are 4 details that I appreciate about Stevie Wonder's music that maybe other folks haven't thought about a great deal.

1) Near the end of "Do I Do" where he has a go at rapping and quickly derails into saying "za za [sentence fragment] za za" like some forgotten, aphasic member of the Sugar Hill Gang. It was so completely game of him to do this and then leave it on the record. It's a party. Stevie doesn't give a fuck that he can't rap. So awesome.

2) The key change near the end of "I Just Called To Say (I Love You)"... yes it is a pretty terrible song, and that last key change has got to be about the corniest time and fashion in which a key ever was changed. But I recognize this as an achievement, and on the few occasions I have ever listened far enough into the song, that key change has never failed to cause my eyes to clench shut and my arms to curl up to my chest like I was hugging a blanket.

3) At the start of "Don't You Worry (Bout A Thing)" when he's pretending he can speak Spanish. Dude's got a sense of humour. I love it when a genius has a sense of humour.

4) Also from "Do I Do" - how completely stoked is he is to have Dizzie Gillespie playing on his song? It's so nice to hear Stevie being fully psyched about that.

Probably I will write up something about the show afterwards even if it's just "hi it was good! i mean wow - stevie - okay bye now xxxxxxxxxxxxx"

(If I don't it's because I'm busy or I have to buy some stupid cable to make the inter net go at my new house).

Sub-blogg

2007-02-06T08:28:00.000-08:00

Since I have foresworn computer games, my idle time is often spent drawing and scheming on how maybe - just maybe - I could make a comic that is pretty decent. Often I want to shout my ideas at the internet, futile though it may be.

However I know from personal experience that it is generally pretty intolerable when a comic creator has a whole bunch to say about every minor detail of his project. To be exposed to such a person, it is like wading through dead leeches or possibly sea cucumbers.

Consequently I have created another blog in which to direct such things - I have just added a bunch of recent sketches that I inked with my new magic pen. Those of you with a perverse desire to witness me punching myself in the testicles for not being exactly like Chris Onstad are welcome to check it out.

Another Comic, Some News, and BONUS

2007-01-31T06:16:00.000-08:00

Another Comic:

A Small Kobold 1996 presents: "Civilization 2" done got concluded.
Once again you gotta click on the comic to make it remotely legible.

I am still playing around with the look and composition of things. Also I am slowly straightening out my ideas about how to write a comic. On a list of "Things That Ain't Easy", producing a good quality web comic comes somewhere not far behind "pimpin".

a-small-kobold.com remains essentially broken for now (in fact I recently noticed that it has mysteriously discarded some of the episodes), so I guess I'd better sort that out before I draw any more.

Some News:

Operation: Get The Hell Outta Chiba is nearly complete and in a couple of weeks I'll be moving to a spot much closer to any place I could conceivably ever want to be. It's in the middle of a triangle formed by Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Nakano - an area I will henceforth refer to as RAD DUDEZ TOWN.

(Thinking about printing some RAD DUDEZ TOWN T-shirts with the lettering kind of made out of lightning bolts or possibly bones from a skeleton).

So I'm sure you can all imagine my relief.

BONUS:

Brett Lee's duet with Asha Boshle - an apalling song that has been hugely successful in India. (I'm sure I'm well behind everyone that lives in a country where cricket is actually played here).

Brett's first single and hopefully his last... Asha Boshle on the other hand, has been running shit for maybe about 40 years. She sings on almost every Bollywood song I like - actually for much of the 70s it seemed she sung on every Bollywood song full stop. Here's an example from 1972 - and for added geek value, let me point out that it was ripped by The Black Eyed Peas for a recent-ish single... I'd call them rascals if that term didn't imply affection.

But YouTube Links Don't Really Count...

2007-01-19T07:13:00.000-08:00

I don't know why Falco thought he could carry this whole video on his own.

It's like an anthology of everything I ever did while looking in a mirror when I was about 11 years old.

My Next Tattoo

2007-01-16T20:25:00.000-08:00

All these soft boys that be tatooing the sides of they necks with pictures of like some dice on fire or crossed chequered flags and skeletons in top hats - perhaps the name of a suburb in Gothic font, or VEGAN 4-EVA in baseball writing... Chinese words they ain't understand, whatever else... all these soft boys and girls need to realize that they've been straight up wallpapering their bodies with FILLER.

What we got us right here is some CONTENT!!!!

Forehead or torso is the only question that remains.

A Comic, Thoughts on the Year 1996, and BONUS

2007-01-11T05:17:00.000-08:00

I dunno if anyone ever clicks the link off to the right labelled "A Small Kobold" Web Comic - I know I wouldn't, given that it has not been updated in months... but anyway that is a comic that I work on sometimes. A man ought to have a hobby you know.

Well, I finally did another comic... only to discover that something has gone awry and I can't get the update script to display the sorry thing. If you visit the site now, you can read me complaining about this.

I will probably fix my site once Jeremy tells me what to do. Shitty thing needs an overhaul anyway (any volunteers, by the way? I don't know about inter net stuff and don't have a lot of time to learn...)

So anyway, for the time being you can see the comic right here - if you click on it, it should spring up into a legible size... be aware that it contains adult (adolescent?) references to DRUG USAGE... only stuff I learned from reading educational materials though of course.

I set this comic in 1996 because I needed to distance it from the continuity of everything else I've been doing, and also because 1996 is when Civilization 2 came out. But I had a hard time trying to give it a 1996 feel... in fact, I can remember very little about what 1996 was like. This got me to thinking - I figure that 1996 retro must be about due - and for some reason, this filled me with loathing and dread. But why? I wasn't sure.

So I took a look at the top 10 songs of 1996:

1. Macarena (Bayside Boys Mix), Los Del Rio
2. One Sweet Day, Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men
3. Because You Loved Me, Celine Dion
4. Nobody Knows, Tony Rich Project
5. Always Be My Baby, Mariah Carey
6. Give Me One Reason, Tracy Chapman
7. Tha Crossroads, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony
8. I Love You Always Forever, Donna Lewis
9. You're Makin' Me High / Let It Flow, Toni Braxton
10. Twisted, Keith Sweat

That's why. 1996 Presents: "Music to Cut Your Own Genitals By..."

Actually I'm pretty worried about mid-to-late 90s retro altogether. Things got worse as the decade went on - I'm talking about shit like Aqua, the boyband revival, "Candle in the Wind 1997" (which was STILL in the top 10 in 1998!), all that terrible vocoder crap that Cher kicked off in 1999...

As for the fashion - who else remembers the remorseless ubiquity of lime green and orange? Skeletal models, heroin chic anyone? (Anyone???)

If it hits us consecutively, we're due for about 6 straight years of nostalgia for one of the most apalling slump periods that global culture has ever known. In all honesty I would be happier doing "Aztec retro" and have my still-beating heart cut out with a stone knife and brandished before my agonized, disbelieving eyes... there would probably be some half-decent drumming happening nearby.

Okay!

Paranthetically, 1996 also brought us the phrase "no diggity", which I still don't know how to use.

Is it like:

Q: "Would you care for a cigarette?"
A: "No diggity!"

I dunno, is that plausible? Is it? Friends... I really don't know. (I have "no diggity"? Maybe?)

Advice is being accepted on that one.

-------------------------------------------

BLOGG UPDATE BONUS:

Would you drink out a glass designed by this man?

Currently, there is a 7-11 promotion here in Japan where if you buy a bunch of beer you can take home a glass that he designed. My flatmate bought a bunch of beer and that is exactly what happened. The glass itself is kind of a wonky shape and has angel wings on the side. You couldn't fit much beer in it... actually it sucks pretty bad.

The picture above is on the side of the box - don't it just make you want to... drink a laughably small serving of beer? Or go fox hunting?

Happy New Year and Chiba Sucks

2007-01-09T22:09:00.000-08:00

AWRIGHT MY DOGGS HAPPY NEW YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHhrrrr

here is a pie chart that i made about new year's eve:

(click on the graph to make it legible eh)

I was blessed with the company of good friends over the Christ's Mass and New Year's period - our adventures were many, and our depradations upon the weak most grim. Tears and laughter spilled from our respective faces and teemed and roiled upon the streets, just as rain from the sky didn't - except for a couple of days maybe - what I am saying here is that we had fun and the weather was good (though cold! Oh so cold! I had to pull my hat down over my whole face more than once).

Further details of our exploits may emerge in the future but for the time being the flickers is updated. A record of selected moments from those occasional times that I remembered to bring my camera and didn't leave the battery at home... this included most times when nothing particularly interesting was going on nearby.

Anyway the main idea I have to present to you today is that Chiba SUCKS. This is a thought about Chiba that originally occurred to me one day when I looked out a window on the 19th floor of the 100 Sen building and saw this:

I think we can all agree that is mostly a picture of some bull crap - in fact this is kind of the good side as you can't see the exhaust stacks from the various oil refineries that dot the harbourside belching plumes of flame into the night. It is a terrible place. When someone uses the word "hole" in my vicinity I immediately think of Chiba city instead of, say, some kind of space in the ground or an aperture on the surface of an object.

Well, it seems my intuitions on the subject are confirmed. Yesterday, Dave was leaving and needed to check in at the airport around 3:30pm, so I figgered we'd kill the afternoon in Chiba - it's a convenient mid-point between my place and the airport, and the train station has ample lockers for a dude to stash his backpack.

"What attractions does Chiba offer a traveller whose stay is virtually over and who doesn't care overmuch about the quality of his last few experiences?" - that is what I wondered to myself. The answer to this question is: NOOOOOOO.

CHIBA HAS NOOOOOOTH-ING.

Here's the official japan-guide.com entry for Chiba. But don't bother reading it - allow me to summarize:

"Many tourists visit Chiba... because the main airport is there. Here's a picture of a plane! FULL STOP. [noise of a goose honking]"

I mean the entire purpose of that website is to make people hyped up about Japan being awesome. It is not supposed to be giving any real objective or critical view - yet their best attempt at positive spin is: "CHIBA... there's an airport!"

"CHIBA: We make it easy to leave!"

Japan Reference rather apologetically notes Chiba's economic importance and concedes that it is "not a major touristical destination" (touristical, Japan Reference? TOURISTICAL???). The reconstruction of Chiba Castle is damned with faint praise, being "large enough to be appreciated".

The Lonely Planet, meanwhile, maintains a monkish silence and omits Chiba from its index altogether.

And Wikitravel actually goes so far as to actively mock Chiba (in between irrelevant references to William Gibson's use of Chiba as a setting in Neuromancer, doubtless inserted by some fanboy editor). A sample attraction:

[Chiba Port Tower] offers views of the surrounding industrial wastelands and container docks, at least for a kilometer or two until they fade off in the smog. There is also a delightfully pathetic display of stuffed fish mounted on sticks in a simulated ocean environment downstairs; the simulation is needed since heavily polluted Chiba Bay hasn't sustained anything above seaweed (or with less than 3 eyes) for quite a while. Entry ¥410, open daily from 9 AM to 7 PM (or 9 PM in summer).

So basically I feel justified in being completely racist about Chiba now, and all the more eager to uproot myself from the suburbs and move into some over-priced meat locker of an apartment closer to the heart of Tokyo.

(DISCLAIMER: I guess I am mainly dissing Chiba City here. Chiba Prefecture appears to maybe have some pretty good stuff in it - but Chiba City is making a hell of weaksauce effort for Japan's 13th biggest city - does even the pachinko suck in Chiba? Do they only have like "Demolition Man" and "Addams Family Values" machines from ten years ago? I imagine a generation or forklift drivers, trapped playing "Guns'n'Roses" themed pachislot and dreaming of the day they can afford to move to Yokohama...)

No real conclusion by the way - Chiba sucks, I'm getting the hell out of it. That's the deal.

Godziller XXXmas Mixxxx 2ksixx-xxx... x...

2006-12-28T08:26:00.000-08:00

GODZILLER XMAS MIX 2006 "Xmas in Tokyo - Special Guest Appearance: Richard Harrison"

Okay for those that know I put that my 2006 Xmas mix up at a place where it can be downloaded on Xmas Eve. It was a near thing to get it done in time and there are perhaps several seconds fun to be had in guessing which parts were stitched together at the last possible moment.

The concept of this mix is founded on two articles of belief:

1) "Let's go!" is the single most hyped up thing you can say to a another person.
2) People should enjoy themselves before they die.

Here is a track list:

1) Thunderfist promo spot
2) Introduction (ft. Microsoft Mary, Microsoft Sam, and L'il Jon)
3) Beastie Boys - Sure Shot (Godziller's Dust Brothers Tribute I WILL SURVIVE mixxxx)
4) Rakim - I Know U Got Soul (Godziller's 80S RAPPERS WHY AIN'T YOU COME CORRECT WITH THE ACAPELLA Thinking Man's Remixxx-xxxx)
5) Quantic ft. Spanky Wilson - When You're Through
6) Breakestra - At The End of The Day
7) Carleen & The Groovers - Can We Rap
8) Starving Artists Crew - SAC Swagger
9) Kool G Rap & Polo - Play It Again Polo
10) Titanic - Love Is Love
11) Professor Longhair - Big Chief (part 1)
12) Pierre Dutour - Following You (2 Live Crew party mash-shhh...)
13) Ananda Shankar - Dancing Drums
14) Malo - Street Man
15) Missy Elliot vs. Kano ft. the drummer from Liquid Liquid and also Ludakris - Gossip Folks '81 Jam (Godziller's SO CAN I JUST LAYER THIS UP IS THAT HOW IT WORKS Remixxxxx or maybe just an edit depending on your criteria)
16) Outkast - Morris Brown (edit)
17) Lefties Soul Connection - Organ Donor
18) Can - I'm So Green
19) ODB - Snippet of a Remix That Maybe Didn't Work Out So Good My Doggs
20) Pugh - Love, Love, Love
21) Dungen - Festival
22) The Staples Sisters - Let's Do It Again

FINIS

First year with no Alice Russell! Somehow along the line the lovely lady fell off in favour of more Nordic rock... possibly a controversial decision that...

Woo!

2006-12-18T18:39:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I became an uncle!

Eleanor Melanie Vincent was squeezed out of my big sister at the pretty civilized time of 7:35 PM. Early reports indicate that she is a baby.

Another thing of note that happened yesterday - I rode 60 stories in an elevator decorated with images of dolphins swimming through outer space, jostling with various gas giants that were depicted with an unrealistic clutter of rings - the cab suffused in pelagic light and the kind of wafting mood music that I associate with slightly incompetent massages.

It was as though I had been briefly transported to an alternate reality in which Seal's career had been taken extremely seriously and had ushered in an Aquarian age.

You can get an impression of the experience if you watch this and imagine that instead of Seal in the video it is me, and instead of singing and pretending to play a loom I am just looking around in kind of an alarmed way.

A Small Observation That Relates To How Things Are Different In Different Places

2006-12-10T20:43:00.000-08:00

I still can't read - the pre-school eagerness with which I shaped the sounds of street signs and autistically bellowed them to the world has not translated into my adult life it seems. Basically I cannot bring myself to memorize kana because it is so astonishingly boring.

The intention remains, but like many of the less base intentions in my life, it languishes for want of self-discipline or any impinging deadline (if you can do something anytime you want, why not do it never?)

So anyway, one consequence of this is that I choose toothpaste mostly at random. My latest batch is peach-flavoured... I saw myself flinch in the mirror when I realized. (The previous tube was a more pleasing eucalyptus).

Still, I suppose I should be grateful that I bought actual toothpaste, and not testicular moisturizer or some such awful unguent that might end up in the same supermarket aisle. As an illiterate and a cultural outsider it is extremely easy to buy the wrong thing. A few examples of the mistakes I've made:

* Cheese instead of butter. (could happen to anyone yeah)

* Useless half-size lengths of cloth instead of bedsheets. These are about as long as a regular single-size bedsheet but only half as wide, being therefore pretty useless. Also they cost twice as much as an actual bedsheet - what are they forrrrr??????

* Vile potting mix instead of coffee ground. (The mistake may have occurred at the factory in this case)

* A hateful sugary nougat instead of peanut butter. The jar had a picture of a peanut on it - what am I to conclude? But this loathsome confection is suitable only for the baiting of cockroach traps, being alluring only to vermin. Alas, the roaches are wintering elsewhere and I have no-one to spar with.

...and there are many more. But I am now so accustomed to making do with whatever I accidentally buy that further examples are lost in a haze of other such everyday occurences as stooping to walk through doorways and explaining to people that I am not American.

Tha Flickrs Is Updated

2006-12-04T09:17:00.000-08:00

Some new photos are up in the place, with especial reference to a festival I went to last weekend.

At the moment I am writing better photograph captions than blog entries so it may be worth a look-in for those who are unaccountably prose-hungry.

Dandruff production continues, but I have leeway for genuinely creative pursuits also. Currently I'm mostly working on my Xmas Micks Two-Thousand-Sicks. I intend to have it available for download before December 25.

Whose Job Is It To Write This Stuff?

2006-11-27T03:35:00.000-08:00

I don't normally bother to record these things, but I just got my coat back from the drycleaners in a big old plastic bag. It was a bag suitable to contain a large coat.

On the bag is printed the following:

ENJOY YOUR LIFE

I wrote my first letter to you, and since that time one happy year has elapsed. When I first picked up my pen to write to you, we were total strangers. But now, we are even closer than friend, bound together by the strongest chains of good confidence. As long as we live, this memorable day will be marked on my calendar in brightest red. "Enjoy your Life" to both of us on this our every-day.

Incidentally, one of Futawamukodai's many scary, interferring old ladies gave me a telling-off for taking too long to pick up my coat (!) - "But I was working!" I protested. This was, of course, a total lie - and the lie did not impress, or was perhaps a non-sequitur in this context. I am developing a habit of lying and asking unnecessary questions purely to practice my Japanese, which remains very patchy and generally woeful. I am like a three-year old that for some reason knows the word for "business trip".

Evidence of Activity

2006-11-24T07:03:00.000-08:00

Yeah so, I've been pretty quiet I suppose.

You see, someone released a computer game where you can be a Middle Ages Dude and use Strategy. You can even play as the Byzantine Empire... but of course, you gotta unlock them first. I feel ambivalent about having my each and every obsessive foible tapped and ruthlessly exploited by a computer game that is basically a big spreadsheet - I wonder if a fish ever feels flattered: "You put a worm on that nice shiny hook, just for me???"

Nevertheless some scrap of duty towards my friends - both real and imaginary - remains. Here's a sample frame from the next A-S-K update:

(If you're wondering why Keith looks different, this particular comic is set in 1996. It's called "CIBBILIZATIONS TWOS" and was conceived out of my reflections upon my hopeless addiction to games in which you get to be a Dude who Uses Strategy).

Apart from various wastes of time, I have been hunkering down and weathering the inevitable period of disillusionment and vague homesickness that Science tells us is worst around that 3-4 month mark. It ain't nothing to be concerned about, mostly I have just been feeling annoyed about crowded trains and that sort of thing. I must confess that, at times in my private thoughts, I have referred to the Japanese language as "jabbering" - as in the sentence: "WILL YOU NOT CEASE THAT INFERNAL JABBERING, WILL YOU NOT EVER"... anyway I believe I am through the "Grumpy Pants" phase now and I'm feeling pretty decent.

The weather has turned and it is basically like an Auckland midwinter here already. Christmas decorations are everywhere (despite the fact that it is not celebrated outside of department stores here) - in fact a house in my neighbourhood is fair festooned with lights - some incongruously shaped into the silhouette of flamingos - flashbacks to TOKYO BAY SPARKLING NIGHT. The look is completed by a Nativity of sorts in the yard: a glowing Doraemon straddles tinsel-clad Thomas the Tank Engine, as Santa Snoopy looks on with sage approval.

Hmmm. The preceding sentence, though barely intelligible, is a concise and accurate description of the scene. I should get a photo, really.

(Note that this particular house retains its overadorned, schizophrenic tone throughout the year. It is well stocked with ceramic labradors and other such cringeworthy oddments, even in more profane seasons)

A Troubling Connexion

2006-10-25T07:50:00.000-07:00

There appears to be a linear relationship between the amount of time I spend playing turn-based strategy games on the computer, and HOW MUCH DANDRUFF IS COMING OFF MY GOT-DANG HEAD.

I could draw you a graph.

Seriously there is a correlation - I just conquered Britain in a Roman Empire simulator and suddenly I gotta run a snowplough over my suit everyday before I go to work. I feel like I should be carrying around one of those fancy gloves that people use to get cat hair off of furniture so I can clean up after myself on the train. Bro - it is chronic.

You see, I've been keeping a low profile of late as I wait to get paid so I can afford to do some stuff. Just working and lounging around at home watching TV shows or conquering the Mediterranean world (instead of drawing or writing as I ought). I have now been paid, so expect some more interesting write-ups in the next few weeks.

Parenthetically - I did go somewhere - I went to Ueno Zoo. It reads like this:

IN MY HOLIDAYS I WENT TO THE ZOO. THE ANIMALS THERE ARE MOSTLY CRAZY AND LONG FOR DEATH. MY FAVOURITE WAS THE SLOW LORIS.

...I didn't feel it deserverd its own write-up.

I MIGHT GO TO THE NOODLE MUSEUM??!?!!?!?

I Drew A Picture...

2006-10-11T08:47:00.000-07:00

...and put it on my comic website as a token indication that I have not given up on my comic website. Colouring it in was just a further morsel of contrition - a swipe at the snivelling nose of my shame.

(The shame in that metaphor being shame at my own procrastination. I think? I should go to bed.)

I'm Still Terrible At Doing Inter Net

2006-10-09T22:18:00.000-07:00

Since I update at pretty random intervals, it has been suggested that I implement something called an "RSS feed" so that people could maybe have postings emailed to them when they are created rather than forlornly checking every now and then (is that how it works? I don't even know if that's how it works?)

So I followed some instructions on a webpage - if you look on the right-hand column over there you will see a button like this:

The button will take you to a feed. I don't know what you people are supposed to do next to make it go though.

PLEASE DON'T ASK ME ANY QUESTIONS ABOUT HOW THIS WORKS OR WHAT IT IS FOR OR I WILL MAYBE START TO FEEL WORSE ABOUT MYSELF

Thank you.

UPDATE: Well I had a play around and it looks like to use a feed you normally have to have some kind of program that collates all your RSS feeds for you every day and prints them out as a newspaper, so you can sit there like a bigshot and read a bunch of people complaining about George Bush or some soup that they ate in the most efficient way possible.

I'm not sure if any of my friends or family are that kind of person, so I found another button I could press and now you can just get new postings emailed to you - click on the "subscribe by email" link at the bottom of the right hand column. Dunno if it works properly but we can find that out together.

People In Olden Days Knew How To Talk About Rude Stuff

2006-10-07T07:04:00.000-07:00

The following delightful piece of slander comes from Procopius' "Secret History", published posthumously in the 6th Century AD. It's a description of the Byzantine Empress Theodora, consort of Justinian I - he's generally considered a pretty bodacious dude as far as Byzantine Emperors go, though Procopius evidently had an axe to grind:

On the field of pleasure she was never defeated. Often she would go picnicking with ten young men or more, in the flower of their strength and virility, and dallied with them all, the whole night through. When they wearied of the sport, she would approach their servants, perhaps thirty in number, and fight a duel with each of these; and even thus found no allayment of her craving.

Throughout his career Procopius was commissioned to compose various panegyric histories in praise of Justinian's imperial achievements. I suppose he wrote the Secret History after hours as a way of venting against a boss he didn't particularly appreciate. He puts his prose through various contortions in order to assert that Justinian was simultaneously a moron and yet infernally cunning, finishing off with a literary shrug and a story to the effect that "his head completely detached off his body and flew around the room this one time". But Procopius reserves the best of his venom for the Empress Theodora. He continues:

And though she flung wide three gates to the ambassadors of Cupid, she lamented that nature had not similarly unlocked the straits of her bosom, that she might there have contrived a further welcome to his emissaries.

Have you ever read such a splendid description of some basic rudeness?

The scholar has this to say of her early career in the theatre:

Often, even in the theater, in the sight of all the people, she removed her costume and stood nude in their midst, except for a girdle about the groin: not that she was abashed at revealing that, too, to the audience, but because there was a law against appearing altogether naked on the stage, without at least this much of a fig-leaf. Covered thus with a ribbon, she would sink down to the stage floor and recline on her back. Slaves to whom the duty was entrusted would then scatter grains of barley from above into the calyx of this passion flower, whence geese, trained for the purpose, would next pick the grains one by one with their bills and eat.

The complete text of the Secret History is available here, though I caution that despite the many elegant, classical euphanisms for "eh that girl she nuttin but a straight up ho", it's not exactly a page-turner, especially if you don't know the background. I would recommend instead John Julius Norwich's 3-volume History of Byzantium, which might be at your local library if it doesn't suck. If you're an author of fantasy fiction you could pick a chapter more or less at random and easily base your trilogy upon it.

As for Japan: the Japanese are quiet. Keeping their heads down. They know what's up. And I have reached a conclusion regarding typhoons: Typhoons are bullshit.

Today I Didn't Even Have To Use My AK

2006-09-25T00:10:00.000-07:00

Well shucks it is pretty nice weather today. Things have cooled down a little and the sun is out. Temperature is low-to-mid 20s most of the time at the moment. Dragonflies in the garden. I saw smart yellow butterflies doing a mating dance, or possibly an attempted rape, while I was hanging out the washing. The dude butterfly got rejected and then flew into a spider web. I felt a lot of empathy towards that butterfly, like maybe he was my spirit totem or something.

(Here I am imagining a glossy, beautifully illustrated children's almanac called "Losers of the Animal Kingdom", that butterfly is on one page, maybe a shot of him all snarled up in the web, and on the next page is a picture of me with my hand stuck in a peanut butter jar. With maybe a pregnant male seahorse on the cover.)

But I digress. It's a lovely day so I walked the long way around to the supermarket and discovered a park. Perhaps a good spot to down cold brews on the adventure playground in the middle of a humid night. When I got to the supermarket car-park there was a stand-off happening between the police and a small group of moped enthusiasts. The gang had these piddly little white mopeds, and the police had rolled up on their own cute little motorcycles, about half a dozen of them. I assume it was a stand-off - neither group was speaking, both were idling about and shifting their weight from foot to foot, as though waiting for the others to leave. I had the distinct impression that the police were waiting for the youths to confess some crime (any crime?), and had previously issued an ultimatum to the effect that "they could wait all day if necessary". I may well have misread the situation.

Finally I had a happy discovery in supermarket - they make loaves of croissant bread here! It's like a croissant.... except it's a LOAF of croissant. Brilliant idea! I just ate some - seriously, just now.

Things are pretty okay!

More People In Japan Need Me To Explain English To Them

2006-09-16T06:36:00.000-07:00

There is a finance company here called NoLoan, and their motto is "Yes!".

Tokyo Bay Sparkling Night

2006-09-16T05:47:00.000-07:00

Dang, well, it seems I have been kind of a useless prick and not really updated my blog in a considerable spell and in terms of actual things that I do in my life even longer.

Remedy. A few words on my first all-nighter here in Tokyo.

First a note on how the night life works here. Most gigs and events start comparatively early. 7PM is common. This is because the city is enormous and most of the attendees at any given gig will have no realistic option for getting home if they miss the last train, which is generally around 11PM to midnight. Basically if you miss the last train - or choose not to take it - you gotta just keep soldiering through to the first morning trains, around 5AM. Or pay for a cab which would probably be the equivalent of about $300 in my case.

Last Monday was homeboy Joe's birthday (also the anniversary of that other thing), so a group of us gathered to celebrate Joe's birthday in whatever fashion Joe did see fit.

Joe's decision: TOKYO BAY SPARKLING NIGHT

TOKYO BAY SPARKLING NIGHT is a two hour harbour cruise featuring musical entertainments and All You Can Drink. Sounds pretty classy, yes?

Digression (again):

All You Can Drink is an idea that has a lot of legs over here. It is an option that exists in most places, and all things considered, it is generally pretty cheap. I'd like to say that this demonstrates a seasoned, responsible attitude towards alcohol that is not be found in New Zealand's notorious binge-drinking culture. People say that kind of thing about Europe all the time - "oh you know it is just another kind of ordinary thing over there, little kids straight up drink wine and beer at the dinner table with they parents". I mean if nine-year olds kids are cold getting hammered at lunchtime, Europe gotta be more grown-up about this stuff than we are, right?

I'd like to say the same kind of thing about Japan because I consider myself a guest in this country, and a guest should be gracious. But I've tip-toed too many times over the dessicated remnants of last night's vomit, anonymously splattered over a train platform or parking lot, to entertain that notion with any sincerity. The descendants of fried pork and kimuchi proud and evident, and on a Wednesday morning no less. Basically people get out on the munt a lot here. The main difference between NZ munterdom and Japanese munterdom is that here, economies of scale exist that make All You Can Drink viable. Also people are still pretty polite when they're drunk.

I would like to make it clear at this point that though I ain't a stranger to drunkeness, I consider vomiting and passing out to be pretty gross things and I don't see a lot of point in them. But they are familiar concepts. This is a kind of cultural bridge for me. Throughout my own life, access to an open bar has reliably resulted in disgrace, and regret, and sometimes woe. I'm from New Zealand. If I don't have to pay for my drinks, bad things happen.

So Where In The Name Of Things Holy Was I:

Oh yeah. TOKYO BAY SPARKLING NIGHT is a two hour harbour cruise featuring entertainments and All You Can Drink. Sounds pretty classy, yes?

In reality: no, not classy at all. But certainly a great deal more fun than you'd get from the same idea executed with due dash and decorum. The "cruise ship" upon which TOKYO SPARKLING NIGHT takes place appeared to be an old Norwegian ferry, spattered and rusting, in direst need of a paint job and probably only a couple of bilge pump failures away from being awarded the status of "hulk". I know it was originally Norwegian because no-one had ever troubled to alter the big flag painted on the exhaust stack. To contribute some vestige of "SPARKLE", the place had been gussied up with a few lengths of neon tubing shaped into palm trees and flamingos. Dotted frequently about the ship were small beer stations, where po-faced, bored attendants mechanically poured paper cups full of beer to be snatched up by passing guests (all of us well aware of the time limit on the bottomless cup we'd paid for). There was a lot of nasty, overpriced food being served at the wrong temperature - giving the boat the ambience of a disorderly, rather poor foodcourt, rife with drunkards. On a boat.

Though it was a Monday night, a city this size has no lack for people who have a reason to go out on an old boat and get drunk regardless of the day of the week. So there was maybe a few hundred people milling about, being entertained by women in yukata performing carefully choreographed dances to such hits as KC & The Sunshine Band's "That's The Way I Like It" and "The Macarena" (yeah, the Actual Macarena). In accordance with the general, trans-cultural nature of such events, Someone's Mum went buck wild and was getting krezzy on the dance floor in her own wee space (Matthew has video footage that it may be possible to share at some point). Also a foppish man was pretending to conduct the dancers with broad sweeps of his limbs, while the greater mass of the crowd bounced on the spot and shouted "Eh!" on every second beat like Punjabis at a wedding.

I am probably failing to convey how awesome this all was by the way. You might even believe I didn't think it was awesome at all........ in fact it was very awesome.

And the view from the boat was pretty good, by the way. It's difficult to get any kind of long perspective on the city here, since it's all so cluttered and the land is so flat. The cruise afforded views of the night lights around the harbour, the sprawling cargo docks, and planes taking off and landing from Haneda airport. (As usual, I neglected to bring my camera. Which is a sucks camera anyway.)

After the cruise, still officially in Joe's thrall, we went to karaoke in Ikebukuro. Featuring: All You Can Drink. My previous experience of karaoke had been marred by excessive sobriety and overly ambitious, frankly lunatic song selection (Stevie Wonder? Frank Sinatra? WHAT IN HELL WAS I THINKING????). This time out, by 3am I had utterly ruined my voice singing Metallica's "Enter Sandman" with ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND PERCENT passion and commitment, veins springing from my neck and free hand curving, clutching and clawing at the air; like Satan in the shower, grasping blindly for some infernal towel when he straight up got shampoo in he eyes; like a murder victim curled around the fatal blade, reaching futilely for his killer's throat in some final instinct of revenge.

I will tell you that I was very into that song at the time that I was singing it. Born in Wainuiomata, raised in Te Atatu - sometimes a man's heritage is plain to see. And perhaps even... his destiny????

Keeping Myself Amused... #2

2006-09-08T09:06:00.000-07:00

It's time once more to remind you that I am basically a geek.

(Yeah yeah: Who could forget? -- classic.)

World Cultural Investigator Sandy-Bear recently directed me to Mister Kitty's Stupid Comics Page, an index featuring scans from various poorly-conceived and frankly bizarre comics produced in the last 60-70 years. There is a reason why "creatives" employed in the comics industry have been held in contempt these many decades. In fact there are several reasons and many of them are catalogued on that site.

Of particular interest to me is the highly singular work of 1940s artist Henry Fletcher (AKA Fletcher Hanks, Barclay Flagg). By "particular interest" I mean: basically it makes me shit myself. The weird art, stiffly posed characters... the indescribable writing(*). His heroes are typified by ill-defined and seemingly limitless super-powers, and a uniquely macabre sense of justice. In short, every kind of shit happens in these comics and it will make you laugh and gasp like a tickled infant.

(*) Okay, the writing is probably describable. Right time, right person doing the describing... it could be described, sure. At this minute though, I'm pretty struck and ain't no describing happening, none.

To my delight, a few complete scans of Henry Fletcher stories are available online... I thoroughly recommend them.

Tabu: Wizard of the Jungle: Tabu has a very intense neck. I like how he childishly bitches out his various animal companions during the introduction. "Sh-h Green-Eye! You're making too much noise!" (how loud is he saying that, anyway?) I also like how the slave raiders jabber fruitily on to one another about the various torments to which Tabu subjects them. Verdict: awesome.

"Space" Smith: This one I appreciate for the freakishly drawn action sequences. I also like that "Space" is always in quotation marks - it's not his real name you see. And what is up with "Space's" crotch?

Stardust the Super Wizard: Placid, doe-eyed Stardust continues his surreal battle against America's "Fifth Column" and "the aggressor nations of the Eastern hemisphere". I think if there's one kind of propaganda we can all get behind, it's anti-Nazi propaganda.

Check it out, seriously.

11/09/2006 UPDATE: Huh, I fixed the Stardust link... it was pointing to the same "Space" Smith link again. DERRR BRAAAAIN.

I've Been Trying To Learn Hiragana

2006-09-05T06:29:00.000-07:00

On that topic: IT COLD SUCKS TO BE LEARNING HIRAGANA.

How do babies put up with having to learn to read? I mean, they cry if someone breathes on them. How could they ever have the patience to learn they letters. And yet it happens. This thought alone sustains me as I try to learn hiragana.

----REPORT ESPECIALE----

As regards the blackhead-removal-nose-strips.... they are unremarkable. You put them on your nose for about ten minutes and then rip them off and there is some gunk on them. A man's nose reveals scant difference to the naked eye. Afterwards, my nose was extremely itchy and I spent an embarassing amount of time rubbing and fussing at it, no doubt rapidly replenishing whatever pore-blocking oils and detritus as may have been removed from my nose skin ("nose skin"?). Replacing the divots, in golfing parlance. I was thinking about doing Before, During, and After photos but I suddenly developed a sense of proportion - I mean: what?

Furthermore people have informed me that blackhead-removal-nose-strips are scarcely a phenomenon unique to Japan. Perhaps they are more prominently advertised here, but they are a trusty aid to people who are vain about their noses worldwide. Anyone can know about these things without my help.

What has been gained here, save an intense itchifying of my nose. Let's forget all about it.

Does Your Nose Got A Lot Of Blackheads On It. You... you can tell me.

2006-08-31T08:41:00.000-07:00

These things are huge here:

i.e. little bits of sellotape that you stick on your nose to get rid of NOSE BLACKHEADS. If the cultural importance of a thing may be judged by how frequently it appears in train advertising, blackhead nose strips are right up there with Tokyo Disneyland and women dancing in their undies. One can scarcely glance at any surface without seeing some model's enraptured, angelic face beaming at you with a big black strip over her nose. And now that I've been prompted to notice, I can see that people here have got hell of blackheads all up on they noses. I'm intrigued. On what principle do these strips work? Is it a chemical treatment? Or more like removing a band-aid from a hairy leg - you just yank the thing off and it rips them shits out? How would that feel???

My own nose is much like... Ferrari - a by-word for classic styling and elegance, but all too frequently bright red in colour. Also it typically has more blackheads than a Ferrari, so I consider myself a valid test subject. Next time I'm at Don.K! and I remember, I'm a grab me some nose strips and risk my most noble protuberance for the sake of Science.

You may expect a Report.

PS: Why didn't anyone tell me R.L. Burnside was dead? And has been dead for months? Why did I have to find out from one of my students? I nearly blew the lesson I was cold struck with grief. Sure, people expect old men to die but.... R.L. Burnside?

JON SPENCER WHY DINT YOU SEND ME A EMAIL?????????????

Bin listening to "A Ass Pocket of Whiskey (And A Front Pocket Of Gin)" all night and just poured out some of my Japanese fake beer (made out of fermented barley or green beans or some crass shit) onto the ground to commemorate the dude.

in soviet russia, cockroach steps on YOU

2006-08-24T09:34:00.000-07:00

well shucks so i gets home in the middle of the night and open up my bedroom window and pull back the insect screen for all of three seconds, straight up gotta close me the storm shutters else all kinds of sunlight be splattering across a dude's face at all of 5:30 in the AM on account of the japanese not down with daylight savings and don't know them a thing about curtains besides

little somnabitch COCKROACH fly hisself in through the gap that exist for those 3 seconds like he been just POISED there all evening waiting for a dude to come home on he train and can't even get no beer from the vending machine on account it be switching itself off at 2300 to preserve public order. most times a cockroach can't even fly much worth a damn so you know bastich has made a special effort to come inside and be molesting my personables, sucker is about as big as my thumb, no doubt

a dude don't want to touch no cockroach with he bare skins so i wrapped my hand up in a dirty t-shirt and cold punched that roach in he eye, roach falls onto the bench and skittering around on he back all deathdance 2: electric boogaloo

NOW FOR THE COUP DE GRACE says i, no doubt mangling my french pronunciation as per, partly from ignorance but mostly from wanting revenge about the rainbow warrior

but brer cockroach - who, being punched by a dude some thirty thousand times he size and weight, oughta be dead - he backspin about so speedy and quick i can't hit him for no "coop dee grays", necks thing a dude know he back on his legs and jump to the floor, cold run up in my cabinets

cabinets ain't go nothing ins them so i'm all throwing the doors open real hard BANG BANG BANG and trying to fix my deathly gaze on that roach while he skittering about with a most definite quickness takin' every sort of evasive action, but there nowhere to hide because ain't no objects in the cabinets on account i ain't own no objects yet

roach decide to cut right across the floor, faster than i can believe, but i chucks a towel on top of him, he feels real safe under a towel and don't go running nowhere, so then i'm stomping on the towel BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG lift up the towel and do you know what:

that ol' roach don't give one fig for my stomping and he off on he way again, so's i drops the towel on he head again, this time jumping up and down with both feets BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG

lifts up the towel...

...and he on he way again, across to the other side of the room. i still don't want to get no kind of roach guts on my skin so i grab a plastic coathanger and stabs at the roach: the coathanger stone cold breaks in two, can you believe it

so, i got my jagged shard of a coathanger, rough and sharpish like a stake such as a dude do drive into the heart of a vampire, finally gets a mean bead upon old roachy and STABS RIGHT THROUGH HE ABDOMEN so the roach is kind of in two pieces

all this time i been cussin' the roach out and emitting many choice phrases that my grandma don't know i can say. one more choice curse at the remnants of roach, and i finally get changed out my work clothes and into my casuals. i looks about for a kerchief to scoop up the bits of roach in, finds one, heads back and WHAT DO YOU KNOW: sucker is dragging hisself across the floor, great big hole in he middle, still going hard in the struggle to find a thing to lay he eggs on or whatever. i could kind of hear mr elton john singing "circle of life" somewhere in the back of my head or nearby.

so it gets a bit graphic at this point but i will only tell you that i had to mash on that roach pretty hard to finish him off. i scoops up the remainder and heads out to the kitchen, where my flatmate mark is all "hey what's up was you talking on the phone to your parents" and i am all "what the hell mang how the hell do you thinks i behave towards my parents"

can you imagine in it, on the phone, all cussin' and pounding my feets upon the ground and slamming things 'cos maybe my folks said i gotsta come home from the j-pan and wash up some dishes or whatever. what a thought

mark's dog got so scared he completely ran upstairs to his Safe Place and circled about on the spot being fretful and making supersonic noises

i will not forget that roach anytime. in the end the score is Man: 1, Cockroach: 0, but best believe that shit was GLADIATORIAL

we don't got roaches like that in new zealand

Keeping myself amused

2006-08-20T19:28:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is not a story about my life or anything except inasmuch as when I saw these things in my life, I did emit much laughter.

Versions of the He-Man & The Masters of the Universe intro...
In German
In Italian

I guess I am kind of showing my stripes here but I never claimed to be cool or anything. Well, not recently.

Oh also, my job is okay. I have a house to live in now.

how much toothbrushes could a dude possibly need

2006-08-14T20:29:00.000-07:00

Okay so there's two dudes living here (not counting me), but we got SIX toothbrushes at the washbasin... (not counting mine - I have, oo, ONE toothbrush) ...and THREE more toothbrushes in the shower.

What is going on here. I don't know if this is something that I should talk to the guys about or not. What do you think?

oh man i just ate something extremely crass for dinner

2006-08-11T01:40:00.000-07:00

As cuisine goes, I am still at the stage of pointing at things and saying the equivalent of "oh, I pray thou render it me!". This strategy is facilitated by the fact that most menus have photos of the food, or at least the specials. Thus I am very dependent upon a general policy of "honest appearance" for food, and, generally, I have managed okay. Things that looked delicious have been delicious - things that looked mysterious have typically turned out to be surprisingly good, or at least inoffensive.

That was until earlier this evening. Tonight, I will be studying how to talk to waiters.

For dinner I popped into a little place nestled under a railway overpass in the Ueno area - the smooth jazz muzak within was drowned out every three or four minutes by the rumble and clank of a train passing overhead. It was located where someone's apartment would be in a movie where "it cold sucks to live in the city" is one of the major themes.

Near as I could tell, it was a ramen joint - I mean there are heaps of them around, the pictures of the food mainly featured bowls of soup with noodles and other stuff floating in them, there were faintly Chinese-looking decorations. In fact, I'm pretty sure they DID serve a basic and probably quite acceptable ramen - I merely failed to order it. I've eaten plenty of noodly broth with slices of pork, and bits of compressed crab meat shaped into asterisks and so on - Let's mix this shit up, I said to myself let's choose this one here. It's like a ramen with some kind of brown stuff on top - looks like maybe it will even have some vegetables in it.

When my chosen dish arrived, I flinched a little. The brown stuff was beef mince. Ramen with mince poured on top? Mince? That's kind of twisted. OKAY WELL MAYBE IT WILL EXPAND MY HORIZONS dude didn't you come to Japan on account of worrying about your narrow-ass horizons is that not true. The first bite revealed additional information - it was cold.

No, not cold - the word is clammy.

It was that most insidious of dishes - a meal that is, at first, seemingly palatable, but is cumulatively disgusting - a dish that only reveals how truly foul it was after you have mostly consumed it. If you took out the bok choy, it would be like something an especially slovenly, British university student would eat when they have a hangover. Three day-old chili con carne from out of the fridge, mixed with instant noodles in a brine of cooking oil, peanut butter and cold tapwater. Not even heated up because Brian broke the microwave last week when he used the nice plate with gold trim to do his cheese sandwich.

By now well aware that I was going to have to write this one up, I attempted to ask what in hell I was eating. I'd like to see what a web search would turn up - recipes, official warnings on embassy websites (OKAY MY DOGGS WATCH OUT FOR THIS ONE IT IS COMPLETELY NOT RAMEN JUST SOME KIND OF CRAZY GUNK gross-out LOL - luv, NZ High Commission to Japan), et cetera. Unfortunately I fudged the phrases for "what is this?" and "what is the time?", and ended up asking the waiter what his personal ideas about the concept of "now" are. Naturally I had to invoke DAIJOBU and send him on his way. For all I know, it may not even be meant to be served cold - but hell, I didn't want to be equivalent to the boor who sends his gazpacho soup back to the kitchen you know.

This was not an experience to be quickly forgotten and laughed off. The dish would not let me go so easy. The frigid, ghastly oils in which the food was steeped tainted my lips and mouth, the lining of my throat - all that they touched. I could smell fumes from the stuff for an hour afterwards, seemingly emanating from my mouth, writhing up to offend my nose. I can still feel it slithering about in my guts - an evil-tempered, tumorous octopus, roiling about in its own ink.

In summary, it was pretty bad.

(PS: Japanese food is mostly awesome! But when you're a stranger, some times strange things inflict themselves upon you.)

godammit

2006-08-10T21:19:00.000-07:00

This coffee I bought from 7/11 is BULLSHIT.

Basic Status Update + new photos

2006-08-09T04:25:00.000-07:00

A Dude's Flickr is updated.

Also I have a job and mobile phone now. Not bad going for a dude that does not know a damn thing about what he is doing from moment to moment.

HERE'S THE FLASH FOR WHAT'S NEW: I have enabled anonymous comments posting on this here blog so that one can comment without having to have a Blogger account.

Cheers to "Handsome" Ben for the prompting.

Cold Maxxing With The Gothic Lolitas

2006-08-06T03:55:00.000-07:00

Apparently Sunday is the day to go to Harajuku, around the entrance to the Meiji-jingu, and gawk at the people in funny clothes. So, I did. I got confused and thought there was some reason for me to wander around in Yoyogi Park for an hour so apparently I missed the bit when the "rockers" lay out traffic cones and then do some kind of dance. It's not clear to me what happens since, as I said, I wasn't there for it. I'll go back another time and hang around instead of walking quickly past feeling kind of out place.

Speaking as Today's Man, describing clothes is not something I excel at so I won't really bother to try. I ain't Gwen Stefani or nothing, so don't act like I am. One particular accessory really did astonish me though - a narrow strip of cloth or plastic, generally white, is tied around the face so that it covers the nose, and only the nose. Like the kerchief of a stagecoach robber who feels his only identifying feature is his schnozz (perhaps he has an exceedingly ordinary mouth).

I didn't take any photos because I feel it is kind of uncool to photograph people because you think they look weird. I might be missing the point - I mean it appears to be some regular Sunday routine, maybe having disturbed looking gaijins take photos of you is part of the kudos to be had, I dunno. Anyway I did do a quick web-trawl and find someone else's photos.

This is not my photo, but I did see this actual girl, in this actual costume.

You might as well go to http://www.gardkarlsen.com/japan_tokyo.htm and just pretend I took all the photos.

Oh, and here's what I missed. Next time huh.

I Went to the Ichikawa Fireworks Display

2006-08-06T01:29:00.000-07:00

I almost didn't. The heat, new shoes, and the basic crappiness of my legs and feet have conspired to give me a couple of meeeeean blisters. But in the end the statistics convinced me - anticipated audience of 500,000 - 14,000 individual fireworks to be exploded - about 9 years since I last saw a firework more impressive than a Moon Traveller. I didn't come to Tokyo to sit around in Matt's lounge (though thus far there is plenty of evidence to the contrary).

I could set the scene here, but you might as well just go take a look at teh flickarrz. The fireworks display itself will bear a little more description, since I failed to take any decent pictures of it.

It was pretty astonishing. They started off with a bunch of individual rockets that would easily have provided the money shot of any previous display I'd seen at Waitakere Stadium or wherever. Then about twenty minutes in, a woman with an extremely high-pitched voice made some kind of announcement - she sounded like someone who would clap her hands rapidly and bounce on her heels when she laughs. Here is my attempt at a translation from the Japanese:

Well shucks look at you all getting worked up and gasping and applauding like a bunch of idiots over some little baby rockets that we only set off to test whether the lighter was working. It is pretty pathetic - maybe you ought to leave? I think you should leave. We could give you a sparkler on your way out and you could go home and look at that. You could write your name in the air. Wouldn't that be nice? See, we gonna let off some ACTUAL fireworks now and we don't no-one filling they pants or nothing SO IF YOU CAN'T DEAL - YOU LEAVE. DO YOU GET ME."

And the real jaw-dropping, sky-filling stuff began... and then ended, and we went back to individual rockets and sparklers for a while. I guess the thing about a fireworks display is that you can't just set off everything at once. They had to sustain a 70 minute display or something so it was structured as a series of climaxes interspersed with, well, filler. Overall it was amazing but, well, I'd have edited it down a bit myself. At least you knew when the good stuff was coming because the lady would come back on and say Well okay I suppose you have been patient I guess we can show you some real fireworks again now and stirring martial music would start playing.

They even had fireworks that can explode into a smiley face or a heart. So is fireworks technology now "complete"? I couldn't think of anything to do with a firework that these guys did not do, aside from some Gandalf crap that is not even real.

Afterwards I had to contend with the hundred thousand other people that wanted to catch a train back into the city. That was the sort of thing that, the first time you do it, you can chalk it up as somehow character building. But I feel there would be little benefit in experiencing it ever again.

My First Earthquake

2006-08-04T21:26:00.000-07:00

It happened this morning. It was pretty gentle, and I have decided that it was lucky.

As earthquakes go, it was rather cute.

How To Tell A Dude To Just Laxxxxx Out

2006-08-04T08:15:00.000-07:00

Okay, Matt came back from work and told me how to say "CHILL OUT HOLMES SERIOUSLY I DON'T NEED TO YOU CRAWL AROUND ON ALL FOURS LOOKING FOR 1 MEASLY YEN ON MY ACCOUNT what".

All you gotta say is "Daijobu".

And apparently saying "okay okay okay okay okay" really quickly is effective also.

There Is A Phrase I Really Need To Learn

2006-08-04T04:59:00.000-07:00

I have decided that I am going to behave reasonably seriously about learning the Japanese language for a period of time, e.g. I am going to learn about those dumb squiggles they have instead of letters. Let it not be said that I will not engage with other cultures, their backwards customs, and their obscene, jabbering parodies of speech. I am a dude for the '90s.

Thus far I only really have basic manners, "please", "thank you", "oh dang I didn't mean to step on you AGAIN", etc - the sorts of things I never really bothered to say to people in English. Admittedly, basic pleasantries seem to go pretty far in Japan - but this evening I discovered a glaring, awful gap in my arsenal of stock phrases. I desperately need to learn the equivalent of "nah sweet bro don't worry about it nah man just leave it oh nah seriously bro - just... just forget it".

Here's what happened. I went to a local superette to buy various reagents that I later transformed into a soggy, weeping mass for my dinner. As I made my purchases - secretly revelling in my success at "going to the supermarket", planning a triumphal parade to rival that of bygone Caesars - something came unsprung in my wallet and a number of coins spilled out. So, I picked them up. The apalling thing is that the checkout attendant had heard something rattle off behind him, so, he immediately dropped to all fours and started searching for the wayward coin.

I mean, he had his face right down against the floor, peering under the ice-cream freezer. He was lifting up bags of bananas, his palms and knees were greyed with the dust of the floor. All the while, I'm standing there, aghast, jaw creaking open and shut to no avail, realizing that none of the versions of "excuse me" I have mastered is going to cut it in this situation. Wondering if I should just walk away, knowing that I cannot.

The crowning obscenity; he did find the coin, and it was a 1 yen piece. JAPAN - WHY DO YOU GOT TO HAVE A 1 YEN PIECE. The amount of anything that you can realistically buy for 1 yen is: nothing. I mean, I saw a small piece of driftwood for sale at Tokyu Hands today and it was still 154 yen (admittedly its suchness was hell of powerful). Needless to say, nearly everything costs like 117 yen or 273 yen, so you inevitably accrue these pissy little coins which you will almost never bother to spend. Hell, the smallest denomination acceptable to a vending machine is 10 yen. Surely this is eroding Japan's economy somehow.

Personally, I am saving up my 1 yen pieces to make a cosh.

Anyway, when I find out what the "nah it's cool just leave it" phrase is I will post it here so that others need not forfeit another's dignity for a single, useless yen.

Disproportionate Pride in Minor Achievements

2006-08-03T19:11:00.000-07:00

Well shucks but I've been getting a swolled-up head over some extremely basic things since I got here about a day and a half ago. It is a thing about travelling that, since in many ways you are reduced to the status of a toddler, you can feel a toddler's triumph in minor tasks such as being able to read a street sign or knowing what the next train station stop is going to be.

For example, I caught a taxi cab down to the ward office to apply for my Alien Registration Card, since I am effectively a non-person until I get one. At first dude didn't understand me, and terrified me by grinning and waving three fingers at my face as if to say "Had I but a trident, assuredly would I stab thee". My instinct was to release a jet of ink and flee. Unfortunately, in a Japanese cab the passenger door is controlled by a lever next to the driver. In a Japanese cab, you are always at the mercy of the driver - I'm pretty sure they carry blades to deal with deadbeats. I mean why else would they have so much anti-macassars on all the upholstery.

Anyway, I used the courage in my heart to try again - and again! Ultimately it turned out I was mangling my "O" sounds I think. I was able to correct this using a system where I imagine Mako's face looking at me and then I imagine that I am wearing Mako's face over my face, and then I say the Japanese words again. IT MAKES MY PRONUNCIATION GO REAL GOOD.

Smiling is another of the many uses for Mako's face.

i learned how to order a couple of brews

2006-08-03T06:11:00.000-07:00

nama futatsu kudasai

nama futatsu my doggs

my doggs it appeared to work

2006-07-31T22:13:00.000-07:00

I am posting this for two reasons:

1) It allows me to procrastinate about packing my bags - this dude flies to Tokyo tomorrow.

2) I don't want to only have a post here that says "test". THAT IS WEAK.

Episode 10 of my comic is up.

Um, okay. I will endeavour to make future posts more closely resemble "content".

Churr.

test

2006-07-30T19:10:00.000-07:00

okay so does it work

DOES IT