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My new pride and joy
This is my new fugu knife… which may sound confusing because I have zero intention of ever preparing puffers at home and never had an “old” one, but as you can see, is an apt description nonetheless. I did not need to sharpen it before use because it was more than razor sharp out of the box – very impressive!. The curved blade has a long sweet spot and makes both chopping vegetables and deboning fowl very easy. The balance is just about right for chopping, but I may upgrade the handle with moulded Pachmayr grips and uranium counterweights for proper dicing action. Also, after I add a golden chrysanthemum…
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Shiznit
Oh, man. I think I just stumbled onto the Big Hominid’s second home: DISGUSTING, DEPRAVED, TOILET-RELATED LINK
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Triumph on Jacko
Put down that drink and shield your monitor: Triumph takes on fans outside the Michael Jackson trial
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Unconventional
This is a good story about thinking outside the box: TO MEASURE THE HEIGHT OF A BUILDING WITH BAROMETER
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Osaka Taxi
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…
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My Ainu Roots
A while back, somebody explaining my family ancestry told me that I’m part Ainu. Which is funny, because when I first met my fiance’s dad, he said I looked part Ainu, and I thought he was crazy (I may have Russian sailor blood in me, as evidenced by the occasional rogue bright orange hair on my face, but Ainu?). It turns out that he was right (actually no real surprise since he taught anthropology at Mahasarakham University for a few decades – as usual, I turned out to be the dumbass). // I like how the Wikipedia entry states that men eat with chopsticks, and women eat with wooden spoons.…
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Pedro offers you his protection
What could even hope to match the Goonies 20th Anniversary Celebration? (my sister actually attended it!) Only one thing: The Napoleon Dynamite Festival
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Nuclear Duct Tape
Dammit, they really should be marketing this stuff as the perfect Father’s Day gift: High Performance Duct Tape, Nuclear Grade
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Club Sazae Umeda
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…
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Star Wars Analysis by Neal Stephenson
Over at the NY Times: Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out The first “Star Wars” movie 28 years ago was distinguished by healthy interplay between veg and geek scenes. In the climactic sequence, where rebel fighters attacked the Death Star, we repeatedly cut away from the dogfights and strafing runs – the purest kind of vegging-out material – to hushed command bunkers where people stood around pondering computer displays, geeking out on the strategic progress of the battle. All such content – as well as the long, beautiful, uncluttered shots of desert, sky, jungle and mountain that filled the early episodes – was banished in the first of the prequels…
