Another brain teaser at Namba Parks. The place just gets more and more intriguing as I explore deeper with each visit, and it’s turning out to be a virtual goldmine for Engrish on signs and whatnot.

Sample products strewn around Taro’s van.

Nissan Laurel in my company’s parking lot with a homemade rear wing. I could see the bolts holding it on the trunk. As a side note, the Nissan Laurel was popular in its heyday because it was relatively cheap sedan/coupe but it sported the same 6-cylinder engine as the Skyline. A lot of punk-ass motherfuckers and wannabe yaks still ride around in this car.

I get all sentimental thinking about the Citroens we had. I had a BX and Taro had an AX. The funny thing is that Taro got them both for free, the BX from a professor at Tenri university and the AX from an OBGYN who worked at the hospital his mom stayed at when she got sick. That BX was a tempermental French piece of shit, but it had the smoothest ride because of the hydraulic system, which also allowed me to slam the car to the ground when it was parked and prevented donut-eaters from placing a boot on my tire more than once. I broke the tranny on…

Every so often, I hear of people jumping off the Awaji bridge. Most recently, it was a police officer. It would never really occur to me to go out that way, simply because it seems stupid to me to die by jumping into water, unless you don’t mind drowning if the fall doesn’t kill you. In that sense, the Awaji Straits would be a good place to drown if you didn’t want your body to be found, cause they are DEEP… You would end up as octopus bait or something. It always strikes me as funny when people say that when jumping from a great height, hitting the water is…

I like the details and colors of this photo more on the screen of my keitai, a fact which has exactly zero value to you, dear reader.

Kizu is an area between Nara and Kyoto where Taro showed us the best junk/secondhand/recycle shops we have ever seen. Didn’t take any pictures inside because I was having too much fun looking at stuff.

Scoop of the Year: The mattresses at the Mitsui Garden Hotel in Nara are made by Toyota. True futon otakus know the Toyota I speak of is not the same company that makes the 376mpg Prius.

A weird sidebar on the menu of a pretty lousy Italian chain restaurant in Japan, Saizeria. Turmeric, huh? Just how popular is the “equivalent of cubic zirconium for saffron” in Italian cooking anyway? I reckon they must have had paella on the menu or something. The best paella I ever had was in San Sebastian, at a seedy tapas bar where the barmaid ignored us and had an uncommonly hairy back. The worst fried sausage and peppers I ever had was at Saizeria. I want to know how they can so expertly fuck up a dish that even Tony Soprano can make.