Author: Justin

Mad Cow Pool

Rebuilding beef trade with Japan could take years
Anybody want to bet how long it is before they find more infected beef and halt importation from the US again?
My money’s on three months or less, and this is due one simple factor: Quality control on the US side simply isn’t up to the task of screening every piece of meat – this is an economical impossibility – but the Japanese side will be testing with a vengeance. If meat from an infected cow slips through the US side, it most probably will be found on the Japan side.

Green Benefits

One of the benefits of working next to an R&D laboratory at an electronics manufacturer is that the guys are always playing around with cold lasers and soldering irons and other manly tools of self-destruction. The lab is also the coolest place in the building as the stupid Cool Biz rules don’t apply in there – the huge industrial coolers keep it nice and icy. We all make it a point to walk through there several times a day.
The mad scientists next door are currently developing next-gen hydroponics systems for some project or another. They are testing these systems next to our office windows and on the roof with tomato, eggplant, and cucumber plants, and they obviously are onto something because the yield of these plants is unbelievable. I’ve been supplementing my grocery store and produce stand purchases with what I score at work for the past month or so, and I’m very grateful what with large tomatoes going for a dollar at most Japanese supermarkets.
In work terms, I’m afraid this translates to me commenting that the hydro systems seem to need a bit more tweaking – maybe for, say, energy efficiency! – and that more “testing” is needed. I think I’m going to have to suggest new plants as well, because I’m all cucumbered out.

Crystal Cove

Just some quick news from back home: Crystal Cove State Park has reopened!
Crystal Cove is one of my favorite places back home. It’s been a long decade plus away, and one of the things I miss most about OC is the endless coastline (Curiously, in that decade, our area became quite famous because of a stupid TV program. People never used to know where Orange County was and now they’re all like, “oh you’re from the OC? I watch that all the time!” I. Cannot. Relate.)
Here’s a recent LA Times writeup: LINK
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Miami Vice Theme Song

Speaking of movies, apparently Michael Mann decided he wanted “nothing to do with the TV series” and hence did not use Jan Hammer’s original masterpiece in the new Miami Vice movie. Apparently there’s no Phil Collins or Glen Frey either.
Nothing to do with the original series, eh? That means no Daytona, no Testarossa, not even a Bren Ten! Hmm… I think it’s safe to say, the new movie won’t even come close to touching the Perfect Scene:

The Fast and the Very, Very Okotta: Hick Drifter in Tokyo

Even though my masochistic hobby of watching horribly shitty movies is fairly wide known, I am still fairly ashamed to say that I sat through the entirety of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift this past weekend. It is was basically the antichrist of cinema and has since burned a hole through both my eyes and the hard drive it was stored on.
I will not rip apart the movie point-by-point, because it’s a waste of time. The only things worth mentioning are that:

  1. Somebody didn’t do their homework on drifting… (surprise!) I’ll go so far as to say somebody didn’t even bother to watch Initial D.
  2. Worst representation of Japanese culture/language since Rising Sun (this in itself makes it a must-see, but only if you can do so in a way that doesn’t allow the studio to recover any of the reportedly $100+ million it spent making it – YOHOHO beeyatches!)
  3. Justin Lin reportedly fought to make big changes in this movie, removing typical Asian stereotypes (such as height jokes on the train, and kung-fooey temple scenes) and the like – in the end, I wish he had just concentrated on making a better movie. The whiteboy protagonist is truly a hick piece of trailer park shit who fearlessly wades through endless pools of Japanese teenage tits & ass, beats the yakuza on multiple fronts, and becomes the fucking drift king of Tokyo, for chrissakes. (I am ashamed to say that I hated this character of the Hick Drifter so much, it kinda made me miss Vin Diesel.) YO JUSTIN! YOU ARE REPRESENTING THE NAME, BITCH! STOP FUCKING IT UP! (I saw Annapolis too, fool. That’s 2 strikes.)

Eating the Gift of the Magi

I can’t say much about the Hongshuai Soy Sauce scheme involving production of “soy sauce” from human hair and medical waste, except that the perpetrators should be force fed their own product via beer bong.

The journalists then found the amino acid syrup manufacturer (a bioengineering company) in Hubei province. When asking how the amino acid syrup (or powder) was generated, the manufacturer replied that the powder was generated from human hair. Because the human hair was gathered from salon, barbershop and hospitals around the country, it was unhygienic and mixed with condom, used hospital cottons, used menstrual cycle pad, used syringe, etc. After filtered by the workers, the hair would then cut small for being processed into amino acid syrup.

China, where’s your Kikkoman love?
……..
On a more serious tip, it says a lot about the assholes who perpetrate this kind of shit, and even more about the really evil assholes who let them get away with it; any chance they’re related to the marketers of fake milk powder for babies, which killed several infants and was allowed to continue by the city government for the better part of a year?