Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
Waiting for Bill outside of a Mickey D’s in Shinsaibashi, I was proposed by some Chinese girls who offered to do just this. Wait that’s a lie. They only offered a massage, “kimochi yoku shite ageru yo ni-chan”. Goddamn, gotta love that.
Anyway, this sticker was pasted to a light pole right outside the golden arches, and the previously mentioned ladies of da knight giggled ferociously as I nerdily took a photo of it. Biotches.
I wrote a haiku today, inspired by this site:
Dusty desert road.
Weary rocket soldier sits,
opening the can.
Obviously, I’ve been playing too much Generals lately. And Adam’s recent post on Spam ignited a firestorm in my gut. I was forced to recognize that I need Spam on a regular basis. Need. But it’s too damn expensive in Japan. It’s as if they still price it the same way they did on the black market after the war, but adjusted for inflation.
Happy Spam thoughts:
Spam is one of the few foods that taste better in the “low salt” version. I tried a can of the spicy-flavored Spam a couple weeks ago and it was nice, but I prefer the low salt Spam sliced into slabs and crispy-fried with eggs, sunny side up, decorated with ketchup and sriracha sauce. Oh, damn, why so I do this to myself at work? I’m HUNGRY.
When I was ten or eleven years old, my friend Kohei came to a profound realization and announced that “Spam” spelled backwards is “maps”. It would be much less embarassing for him if I had forgotten to state that he was twice my age; luckily, I remembered.
UPDATE: It seems my black market comment above may have been unfounded. Apparently we Americans blessed the Japanese with loads of Spam after the war, at least this seems to be the case in some people’s experiences:
http://runker_room.tripod.com/tiestalk/spam.htm
You MUST try a Spam Musubi before you die. Must. A musubi is just a ball of rice. Spam musubi has chunks of pink (former) flesh interspersed in it. I have independently developed a thermonuclear version version of the Spam musubi involving kimchi and mayonnaise, and it is a meal unto itself unless you are drunk. In which case, I sincerely hope you don’t get barfy, because the only grosser thing to spew is a meat pizza (personal Bombay Sapphire memory – friends don’t let friends drink gin neat, even if there is no ice and nothing to mix it with).
If you are a mac buff, go forth:
The Macintosh at 20: Interview with Jef Raskin
And by “mac buff”, I mean a true OG (GFINDER) type playa. Not this new breed of iTards whose solution to everything in life is “Buy a Mac!” Yeah, buy a $2000 mac to surf the net and send e-mail you brainless chatwhores.
“Chatwhores” should be my word for the day, but it’s even below my taking credit for.
Note: This entry was posted by my Powerbook 190 (16-shade greyscale, although the right bottom corner of the lcd has inexplicably become a solid yellow). Which means not a goddamn thing except that I miss System 7. Am I alone in my misery?
By the way, GFINDER worked for me exactly ONE time out of approximately 200,000 tries. It exited the command window to the Finder, and then froze, instead of just freezing at the command window.
A client just asked for a 90MB 3D CAD file data to be sent on multiple storage mediums: 250MB Zip, 100MB Zip, CD-R, 128MB MO, and split up on floppies for God’s sake! His reasoning: The workshop in Singapore uses old equipment. He will not listen to my reasoning along the lines of, “if they can open a 3D CAD file that size, I would assume they can surely pull data off a CD.”
Somebody send me an IT geek with a few free hours to play the floppy insert-write-eject-label game (cuz I really SUCK at it)! Well, this is a first if nothing else. All hail the mighty morphin’ corporate tech retards!
The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that, “When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.”
However, in government, education, and in corporate America, more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:
1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
4. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride horses.
5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.
7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
9. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase dead horse’s performance.
10. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.
11. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.
12. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
And last but not least, the corporate steadfast:
13. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.
I am a packrat. I am also a slob by nature, although sometimes I put on a good show of being organized when it counts. I spent the weekend cleaning out my small room upstairs and thinking, “Damn, I’m a packrat.” During my long years as an amateur geek/professional gadget junkie, I have accumulated enough electronic parts and contraptions to completely fill a six-tatami room. I’m talking boxes haphazardly stacked to the ceiling. This is a room you do not want to be in during an earthquake, which isn’t really a joke since this island was the epicenter of the largest quake in Japan in recent history. A hundred pounds of shielded cables crashing down on your leg would be a lousy way to wake up, methinks. Anyway, regarding this room – basically, I have been promising my girlfriend that I would clean it up and organize my CDs for the past three years. I think I decided to clean it up this weekend just to show her that my word is good. Also, I there was a steady list of “lost” things that I strongly suspected were hiding in that room somewhere – company health insurance card, backup software for my cellphone, ADSL line filters I promised to give to my manager, etceteraetceteraandsoforth.
So. I didn’t finish. Mainly because I started out by trying to organize my CDs. That was a mistake. Let me be clear – when I did my half year of duty in Canada five years ago, I took two weeks and organized all of my CDs into binders. I did this by lining up every CD I had (about 600) and entering them into a spreadsheet (Lileks would have been been proud at the hours of effort I spent on creating the perfect system), then breaking them down into genres and putting them in color-coded Case Logic CD notebooks (the BIG ones). I then placed all of the empty cases into boxes and stored them at my office on Gastown (where they remain to this day for all I know). This was a major accomplishment in my life and every time I DJed after that, I thanked God for giving me the foresight to organize those discs (of course, He decided to relieve me of foreskin so I guess I deserved something in return).
My problem as is related to this post is all of the CDs I have since acquired. Many, many. Between DJing and my lifelong quest for decent tunage (needle in a haystack warehouse if you know what I mean), the amount of CDs I bought in the past five years have been a boon to the music industry. Don’t get me wrong, I was on the empeethree bandwagon before most of you knew that your computer could make more sounds than “beep”, but I like CDs like most audiophiles claim to like records (Yes, I have records too but gimme a fuckin’ break. I drive a sports coupe and have a hard enough time carrying my digital gear around.). I like jacket art, CD-quality sound, and the warm fuzzy feeling I get by filling the pockets of old white CEOs and black street thugs alike.
Well, I forgot where I was going with this post, but I suppose that’s the point.
Oh yeah.
In the grand scheme of my 2nd Grand CD Organization (2004), I am exactly 1/3 finished. Which means my bedroom, where my girlfriend and I usually sleep (Sa-priize!), is filled with boxes and boxes and bags and bags of Compact Disks, CD-Rs, DVDs, floppies (many varieties including “TRON” disk size), Iomega media (both Zip and Jaz. Or was that Jiz and Zap? Ziz and Jap? Wuteva.), and several proprietary media types from various failed loser companies that tricked me into buying their shit and then went tits up. I mean, it’s a fucking joke. Don’t forget, this is just CDs and other assorted media – the small room I’m trying to clean out is probably only 1/10 finished. And now our bedroom is also unusable, almost unenterable. I just called Nam during lunch and without even a hello, she started cursing me out. She was upstairs despairing about where to start cleaning up because she doesn’t want to sleep on the couch again. I forgot what I called for, so I got an earful about what I will be doing when I get home tonight instead. Oh, and I got hung up on. Girls, man. Peh!
I gotta take some pics of the destruction I’ve caused so far. It’s hard to believe it will ever look clean in either of the two rooms. Then again, it’s gotta get better than it is now, or I’ll just burn the whole damn place down after the neighbors next door move to their new house next month. One of the scientists at Peenemunde (where they built rockets during the great war) was reported to have said somthing along the lines of “every fifty years all the factories should be burned down” in order to stimulate technological progress. Exactly what the hell that has to do with burning down my apartment, I don’t know. I just work here, fella.
One of you sickos deserves to die in Politically Korrekt hell… Straight from my inbox:
– What Other Cultures Learn from the Media –
It was the first day of school (in America) and a new student named Suzuki, the son of a Japanese businessman, entered the fourth grade.
The teacher said, “Let’s begin by reviewing some American history.”
Who said “Give me Liberty, or give me Death?”
She saw a sea of blank faces, except for Suzuki . “Patrick Henry, 1775.” He said.
“Very good! Who said ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth’?”
Again, no response except from Suzuki: “Abraham Lincoln, 1863.”
The teacher snapped at the class, “Class, you should be ashamed. Suzuki, who is new to our country, knows more about its history than you do.”
She heard a loud whisper: “Screw the Japs.”
“Who said that?” she demanded.
Suzuki put his hand up. “Lee Iacocca, 1982.”
At that point, a student in the back said, “I’m gonna puke.”
The teacher glares and asks “All right! Now, who said that?”
Again, Suzuki says, “George Bush to the Japanese Prime Minister, 1991.”
Now furious, another student yells, “Oh yeah? Suck this!”
Suzuki jumps out of his chair waving his hand and shouts to the teacher, “Bill Clinton, to Monica Lewinsky, 1997!”
Now with almost a mob hysteria someone said, “You little shit. If you say anything else, I’ll kill you.”
Suzuki frantically yells at the top of his voice, “Gary Condit to Chandra Levy 2001.”
The teacher fainted. And as the class gathered around the teacher on the floor, someone said, “Oh shit, we’re in BIG trouble!”
and Suzuki said, “Arthur Andersen, 2001″…
When the president of the staffing company (5,500 employees) you work for makes it a point to see you in person by pulling you from your desk in front of the whole office, you may feel several hundred thousand butterflies moshing at the Pantera concert in your stomach as you get up and proceed to an adjacent conference room.
Then, when he offers you 3,000 yen ($30) for every gaijin you can introduce that signs on to the firm with the single stipulation that “they are like you”, you can nod and say thank you.
Then again, you could always point out that he is implying your own worth and feel insulted. And tell him the last time you saw somebody sold for so little it was paid for in crack and the bitch looked skankier than Paris Hilton after a six-week opiate binge. Or you could also explain that $30 isn’t even enough to hire an illegal immigrant to do your yardwork back home in sunny CA. To top it all off, you could tell him in your best gutteral gangsta-Japanese to shove it up his ass.
Me, I just nodded and said thank you.
This is how much a “Cool Darts” PC game CD-ROM was in a bargain bin at Autobacs. Laugh #1: It was a Daiso 100 Yen Store game, so I only saved 23 yen. Laugh#2: I paid too much for it either way. The programming was so bad the shit didn’t work after installation, and when I finally did get it to work, a little window popped up with the simple greeting, “Hello, world!”
I guess the thing I want to know the most is why they were selling a Daiso CD-ROM at an Autobacs.
Via Bruce Sterling:
Bagle and NetSky are fighting with each other. In NetSky.F, researchers found the following text: “Skynet AntiVirus – Bagle – you are a looser!!!!” This NetSky worm variant tries to remove Bagle worm infection if it finds it on an infected computer. And in Bagle.K, a message is embedded saying, “Hey, NetSky, f*ck off you b*tch!”