Not to be confused with Yellow Max.
The governing body of Tae Kwon Do in Thailand finally sent Max and Mina’s new belts – in adult sizes! We had to wrap them around their waists 4 times! Anyway, a sharp knife in my car remedied that today (thx M).
Max can now kick hard enough to actually hurt me, but not quite hard enough to do damage. Mina can do damage if you are stupid enough to make her mad and leave your face within scratching distance. ’nuff said.
It means “chipmunks” in some language, probably Russian. Ah, the joys of parenting and looking for non-dubbed children’s animations online.
I had no idea I’d started a trend until recently, when a nurse at the maternity ward told me about similar ones of different babies. She said I’d left a printout of this photo in the private room Nam stayed at and they just kind of left it there. Eventually, people who stayed in that room started leaving similar photos there and the cleaning staff left them all on the dresser. I’ve asked to see them, so if the nurse comes through for me, I’ll post them here.
This is the dope shit for real:
Nam left for Japan on a work trip yesterday, but we are keeping busy at home. Max and Mina’s dojo did a taekwondo expo at the old Sermthai shopping mall in town.
Max likes watching kung fu movies at home, and then forgets he’s studying TKD, not wushu:
Then, predictably, somebody set off Mina and she went all Dragonball on everyone:
Video to follow as soon as it finishes uploading.
UPDATE:
This is what the view from the front of T’s house looked like before the town blocked it with a senior center/foot bath.
I’ve been meaning to write about these cars for a long time. I came across this photo, from around 1999, when going through old albums. I put it aside and it’s been collecting dust on my PC desk since then.
Anyway, about the cars: Yuko-sensei gave T the red Citroen AX and replaced it with a Renault Twingo (She probably still has a thing for French cars – being a doctor, she’s one of the few in Japan able to keep up with repair bills for them.). This was a good small car with manual transmission, and didn’t break down as often as the BX. I used to see a few of these around Mahasarakham, but not for the past couple years.
A teacher who T knew gave me the black Citroen BX with the strange condition that I service it at his friend’s garage. I honored that promise for a while, but got sick of the guy overcharging me for LHM used in the hydropneumatic suspension system. This car was used on several legendary road trips to Tsukuba, Tokyo, and all around Kansai.
Mosaic used to protect the mosaiced.
View from the sunroof.
I also traded it for one day with T’s cousin for a Mitsubishi Delica when we needed a party bus. Owning this car was a love/hate kind of thing.
There aren’t many people who get to own cars designed by Marcello Gandini (the designer of the Lamborghini Countach, the Lancer Stratos and the original BMW 5-series) with oléopneumatique suspension to adjust the ride of their car. This system served a couple purposes: It could be used to slam the car to the ground so it couldn’t be towed away when parked illegally on the street, and it was a fucking spectacle to behold the car slowly rising and falling in any given parking lot at any given drunken time.
Alas, the car was a sensitive and fragile little crybaby, and not suited to my violent driving style (although it was spared handbrake turns because the parking brake was attached to the front brakes!!). Indeed, I broke the gears when screwing around on the racing overpass in Tenri one hot evening, and barely made it back to our garage in Horyuji to get it looked at… Kataoka-san, our mechanic, mentor, and adviser for all things auto-related, checked it out and pronounced it dead on the spot.
I have to admit, thanks to the otherworldly suspension characteristics, the Citroen BX had the smoothest ride of any car I’ve ever known, especially in the back seats. And the home cabinet speakers I carried around in the trunk coupled with mad interior cabin acoustics made for awesome tunes. But due to something breaking or temporarily ceasing to function almost every week, along with assurances from Parisian friends that this was quite normal when owning Citroens, I would never feel the desire to own a French car ever again.
I am at home enjoying a private day off. My wife has work, my kids are at non-summer summer school, and my sofa is beckoning me. Links already:
My Life As a Young Thug
Mike Tyson on how he became an animal.
New line of underwear filters out farts
Is muffling a bug, or a feature?
This post will be compiled almost entirely of material taken from other sources, because I am lazy. If you follow the instructions and install the script successfully, you will have the best YouTube functions integrated directly into Google Chrome. This includes turning off DASH (where YouTube segments videos into parts that prevents you from preloading whole videos – handy for slower or overseas connections), downloading videos in all available formats, and many, many other options.
A Chrome extension for this script is downloadable from the Google Play store, but it seems to be causing a lot of problems. The workaround is to install an Opera extension, which is counter-intuitive, and this is why I’m compiling this short guide.
What is YouTube Center? (via Github)
YouTube Center is a userscript designed to expand the functionality of YouTube. It includes the ability to download the video you’re watching, auto selecting your preferred video quality and much more. Here’s a list of all the features.
How to Install the Opera Add-on into Google Chrome
on the browser toolbar.For me, even just the downloading function is worth the hassle of installation, but really, this is how YouTube should look and work by default.
Just centered this bad boy with a tire iron and a cop came to ask me if he could borrow some tools to fix his motorcycle… He wasn’t a very good mechanic, and I ended up adjusting his carb with the mixture and idle adjustment screws.
The kids are still at TKD…. I feel like a soccer mom waiting for them to finish. A soccer mom in a lowered, black 1971 Kujira Crown.
How I got this is very difficult to explain…
So Max and Mina have been taking Tae Kwon Do classes for a couple months now, and recently passed their yellow belt tests. Watching them develop during their daily sessions (6 days a week) really brings back a lot of memories. See if you can spot why:
Max (5 years old):
Mina (3 years old):
Daddy (11 years old?):
Auntie Mika (9 years old?):
Uncle Adam (7 years old?):
Auntie Merin (5 years old?):
Grand Master Yong Shin (our idol):
The Dynamic Duo:
After the final wars, the lone wanderer roamed the great barren expanse, alone with his unique ability to adapt to the environment:
I can keep watching the money shot (from around 5:05) again and again and again.
I’m not sure what the context is, but I like their expressions:
Taken about a month ago at a restaurant barge in Don Wai Floating Market (which is no longer a floating market, but rather a very hot and crowded indoor market crammed with people), on the banks of the Nakhon Chaisri River, Nakhon Pathom province.
UPDATE: Kevin provides dialogue.
