Just remembered this from Sunday: Four of us got in a cab and headed toward the Hankyu department store to grab a bite on one of the upper floors, before the whole thing gets redone later this year. The cab driver was female. This was only the second time I’ve ever seen a female driver, and we all had fun asking her about the taxi business from her perspective, etc. We had one of those “friendly repoire with the cabbie” things going pretty well; in all, a very cool experience. I guess I got a bit too into the whole thing, though. The question of why all cabbies, independents and…

Through a fiendish twist of events involving Air France stewardesses and fresh squeezed lemon chu-hi, I found myself at a club in Umeda on Saturday night, actually their opening weekend. Basically, the whole experience made me remember why I stopped going to clubs: – I’m too old for that shit – Shitty music played by the wannabe rockstar Djs; from the sound of it, you would never guess that house music has actually progressed in the last ten years – The “fog of war,” cigarette smoke so thick you have to light your own to make it bearable – Insufferable wannabe yakuza penislickers who insist on staring down everyone that…