Must die.
Please God, make them go away. I asked one of the girls why she was all smiles today. She said it was because the new fax machine we ordered came in this morning. She said its sparkling newness was a good omen for the rest of the week.
Oh. Well then.
The thing is, I can’t figure out if she was high on the reefer and making fun of me, or if this is just a sign that the Japanese take their trademark happy worker bee thing a bit too seriously.
Author: Justin
Free E-books: The Baen Free Library
If you like (mostly science) fiction, you should definitely check out the Baen Free Library. On the home page you will find a mission statement by the head “librarian,” Eric Flint, who explains why the books in the library, even though most of them are also available in paper form, are made available for free download. After ordering several paid subscriptions in order to read sequels to books I found in the free library, I can say that I agree with Mr. Flint’s reasoning 100%. I greatly admire what these people are doing.
Over the past couple years I’ve read every book available for download in the Free Library (I prefer RTF format files, which I usually convert to text in Word and read on my laptops or cellphone), and although the Belisarius series and the 163x books, among others, are old favorites, the book I enjoyed the most is Sisters of Glass.
Mind you, a lot of the books in there aren’t so hot, but then again, its all FREE so I can’t really complain. Besides, half the fun of going through any library of books I don’t know is separating the wheat from the chaff.
If you like the works you read for free, you might want to check out their paid Webscriptions and subscribe for their paid stories, as I have in the past, although there is no obligation to do so. One really cool thing about the webscriptions is that they will often offer a free download of the works you purchased to someone of your choosing. Like I said, checkcheckcheckcheckcheck-cha-check it out .
Note: I don’t profit in any way from linking to these sites, I just think they kick ass and deserve more recognition.
Update: BTW, one of the reasons I liked Sisters of Glass so much is that it read so much like a Gibson novel (my first post today spurred this one) – so much so that I wouldn’t be surprised if he actually did write it.
N. Mancer Returns
William Gibson is blogging again:
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp
i left my hairy beast
Damn, this is the funniest thing I’ve seen all week:
Absolutely hilarious eBay ad for motorcycle helmet
(First seen at Gen’s blog, but the eBay page he linked to got taken down.)
Well Done
Back in January, in this post, I wrote about Japan’s de facto online price comparison site, kakaku.com. Much like Buy.com and other American equivalents, kakaku is constantly expanding their listings – from all manner of new and used electronics to insurance plans, hotel rates, and sports equipment. Even so, I was surprised to visit their page for the first time in quite a while this morning and find their newest listing: Funeral services.
Link:
http://www.kakaku.com/sougi/
I’ll translate the instructions for you:
STEP 1: Select desired funeral plan and region. Plans available are Cremation Only (I assume there’s a further choice of Regular or Extra Crispy), Family and Relatives, Standard (40 people), Standard (100 people), Company, or Special (musical themed or non-religious themed, etc.). Regions are currently limited to Tokyo and Kanazawa.
STEP 2: Make more detailed choices.
STEP 3: Receive a quote.
Quick! Easy! We’ll only charge you half the price of a new car to think up a special Buddhist name for the afterlife! Yes, I know I will go to hell for writing this. Satan, beware.
On a more serious tip, though, there’s a listing for a place in Tokyo that will burn a body for you for the modest sum of 136,500 yen ($1,250). Something to keep in mind.
Ask C. Buddha: Celebrity Dreams
Jen e-mailed about the newly-created Nick Nolte’s Diary and asked why celebrities are “always writing about dreams and feelings and flowery shit.”
Well Jen, that’s simple. Celebrities are, for the most part, total fucking pansies with a shitload of free time between making horrible movies, getting jasmine-infused honey colonics, and modeling for “charity.” As for the “vivid dreams” which are a trademark of their web writings, celebrities can obviously afford better drugs and booze than the rest of us.
Phuket Breeze
It was a glorious sunset over the mountains and we walked the endless rows of fruitstands and tourist giftshops in search of seafood. As we neared the plaza concentrated with seafood stands, a young man approached and invited us over to one of his tables. Other stall owners caught movement out of the corners of their eyes as they performed various tasks – wiping down tables, setting out plates – and also came over to beg our patronage.
“Cheapcheap!”
“You want snapperfish?”
“You want crab?”
“Good seafood! Best!!”
We were the very first customers of the night in the whole plaza, and we were being greeted accordingly; we quickly became the center of a very large and growing crowd.
“We have freshest fish!”
“Lobster good!”
“Seafood stew!”
We were inundated with the pleas of a dozen business-hungry vendors. What a wonderfully empowering, yet embarassing sensation! How to choose among them all? We listened to more pitches:
“You like Tom Yum soup?”
“We have noodles, sir!”
“Japanese beer!”
“Kon-ni-chiwa!”
In a fit of desperation, the solution suddenly came to me:
“OKAY ALL Y’ALL NEED TO LISTEN UP! THE PERSON WHO CAN JUMP THE HIGHEST GETS OUR PATRONAGE!”
Nobody seemed to understand this brilliant concept, so I demonstrated, hands raised in the air, I started jumping up and down. My, how they got into it.
“HIGHER LADDIES, JUMP HIGHER!”
As the crowd got even larger, filling with jumping bodies wearing aprons and chef’s hats, I glanced sideways at my companions. They both looked kind of shellshocked, and I admit, it felt a bit like being trapped in a House of Pain video.
A real asshole, at this point, would have led his companions away and made everybody feel stupid for performing tricks for free. I, however, was hungry, and judged the winner of the jumping contest on the spot. We ended up having a very mediocre seafood dinner at his stand, so I learned something valuable that day: How a high a person can jump is a poor indicator of their cooking skills. I learn new things every single day, I tell you.
For the next trip somewhere similar, I’ll have to think of a new benchmark. Any suggestions?
Roadkill in Japan
Have you ever thought that your presence in this world wouldn’t be missed much if you suddenly died? You may be right. Whoever ran over the black cat and just left it there in the middle of my parking lot so all cars coming in or going out would run over it again and again, fuck you.
I wrapped it in my carwash towel and placed it in a nearby caged dumpster; luckily today was trash day.
This roadkill thing really gets to me, though. Roadkill is never cleaned up in Japan. When my pal Gatson’s dad came to visit, he observed this is because “it’s no one’s job to clean up roadkill in Japan, so it just stays there.” Pretty smart guy.
I remember a dachshund that got run over at the exit ramp of a highway in Osaka. The ramp had a traffic light that you almost always needed to stop at, so over the period of six months or so, I got to see this dog corpse in varying stages of decomposition. The most revolting stage was the maggot infestation, which happened fairly early on. Toward the end, it looked like a mummy with two big gaping eyeholes in the dessicated skin still stretched over its skull. The funny thing was that I never caught a whiff of it, even when it must have smelled really ripe, cause that’s just how fucking rank certain parts of Osaka get all year round.
Monkey’s Uncle
As in, mean ol’ uncle Pete:
“New” giant ape found in DR Congo
Somewhere, Michael Crichton is raising a glass of wine and thinking, “I told you so.” And I for one give him full props – he even got the country right! It sounds like the primatologist, Shelly Williams, got extremely lucky she didn’t end up like Misulu:
Something struck him lightly in the chest. At first he thought it was an insect but, glancing down at this khaki shirt, he saw a spot of red, and a fleshy bi of red fruit rolled down his shirt to the muddy ground. The damned monkeys were throwing berries. He bent over to pick it up. And then he realized that it was not a piece of fruit at all. It was a human eyeball, crushed and slippery in his fingers, pinkish white with a shred of white optic nerve still attached at the back…
…And he saw Misulu. Misulu lay on his back, in a kind of halo of blood. His skull had been crushed from the sides, the facial bones shattered, the face narrowed and elongated, the mouth open in an obscene yawn, the one remaining eye wide and bulging. The other eye had exploded outward with the force of impact.
Bad, bad monkeys!
Capoeira: Getting Inverted
Yesterday we went to a capoeira meet at the Budokan at Sumiyoshi Taisha in Osaka. We were invited by Adam’s pal from Kumamoto, Luke. We were supposed to meet other friends there, but they ranked because they are weak/married, etc.
Luke is a fascinating man who was born in South Africa and has travelled around the world studying various forms of martial arts. He has the kind of posture, a way of movement, that says: Hardcore. Basically, he was more focused than most of the instructors that showed up for the meet, and that impressed the hell out of me.
This being my first exposure to capoeira (commonly defined as an Afro-Brazilian dance form that incorporates martial arts moves), I brought along my aging camera and did some damage. Check out the extended entry linked below for the rest of the photos.