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Vendor Problems
It’s never a fun thing to have to deal with yakuza because of a fuck-up created in your own procurement department. Before Golden Week, the stupid noobie manager in Procurement, down the hall, decided to use a local company to mold parts for our products and went by their office yesterday afternoon for a friendly chat because the parts never arrived. He ended up coming straight to our office crying and about to wet his pants after noticing matching Ferraris and a Bentley in the car park of their gated office complex. Fuck. The dumbshit picked, out of all the experienced vendors located in and around Kansai, a goddamn money…
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Post-GW Blues
For those of you that returned to work today and asked yourself that time-honored question, “why in the hell do I still work here?”, I present one of my most effective coping mechanisms: Drum Machine. That is all.
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Golden Week
Golden Week is what they call spring break in Japan. Why it’s golden is something I can’t quite recall, but it may have something to do with the millions and millions of people on vacation at the same time and highway rest stops overflowing with urine. Yesterday I went to pick up my girlfriend at Kansai International Airport. Driving from Nara to Osaka usually takes 30 minutes or so, but it took around an hour this time. Halfway there, I got a call from her saying that the flight was cancelled and she would instead fly in the next day (today, in around 21 hours). Since I was already halfway…
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Bach Processing
Today is the last day of work during this “baching it” period for the Cosmic Buddha. Goddamn, how time flies. It seems only yesterday that I started off eating strange chili concoctions out of the pan and declaring atomic jihad on the world. Fast forward through two blurry weeks of the flurried singledom that defines my bachelorism process to this morning, where you find me eating kimchi & eggs w/leftover pork out of the same pan. Sometimes using my pan as a plate and the spatula as silverware makes me yearn for the good ol’ dormitory days at Tenri U… Then I remember finding rotting fish carcasses half-flushed down the…
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Your ass ain’t worth it
I spoke with a friend about this the other night and we did some rough (read: beer-inspired) calculations to estimate how much money every Japanese taxpayer paid for the release of the Japanese hostages in Iraq this month: about 2,000 yen. I do not vouch for the accuracy of this figure, but I want to make it clear that I do not agree with the decision to pay for their release, no matter what the cost. They chose to go where their country told them not to, and tear-jerking death threat footage aside, the burden of consequence should not fall on our shoulders. 2000 yen per taxpayer for the whole…
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I blame it all on Portishead
I placed a down payment on a theremin yesterday. I have no idea what it will end up looking like, but this is for the best, I feel. For this particular instrument (which I have never played before BTW), not knowing how it will turn out creates a certain excitement I could never attain by simply ordering online or through a music catalog. This was only made possible by hiring an otaku to do the job. Kasama-san is a nice guy, a most skilled bassist, Taro’s business partner (they sell antique condensers, specialized mic shields, and other maniac music shit), and one of the most functional denki-otakus I have ever…
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Cheesecake Factory?
Well, Slate followed up the wonderful variety meat article with one written by a food critic weenie from England, of all places. Perhaps his wittiest assertion in comparing London’s Chez Whiteys with their counterparts in Los Angeles is: “The reason the food is better at London’s top restaurants is that Britain is closer to France.” Although I kind of doubt that the American chefs would accept losing to kidney pie slingers very graciously. The critic’s self-proclaimed noobosity (18 months on the job) is proven with the following: However, once you drop down a couple of notches, L.A. knocks London into a cocked hat. The restaurant I’ve been most impressed by…
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la cucina povera
I’m all for this. As anyone I’ve ever gone to yakiniku with can attest to, my fondness for what even what a lot of Japanese won’t eat. Slimy cow guts taste goooood when they’re fried nice and crispy. And nothing beats a crispy fried pig’s tail. Pig’s foot Milanese is pounded so thin and breaded so thickly that the flavor of the pig’s foot is not readily discernible through the fried bread crumbs. Beef cheek ravioli are delicious, light and pillowy, with only a hint of fibrousness to the meat and a telltale chalky aftertaste. Lamb’s brain francoboli are so heavy on cheese and so light on brain that they…
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BB King
Look at what they’re finally confirming: Japan Offers by Far Fastest, Cheapest Broadband Services: OECD April 21, 2004 (PARIS) — Japanese firms are offering by far the cheapest and fastest broadband services of companies operating in 30 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), according to the first such report compiled by the international organization. The survey, which was conducted in October 2003, shows Japanese companies leading the pack with KDDI Corp, NTT East Corp. and usen Corp offering throughput of over 100Mbps with their fiber-optic networks. This really trickles my bits. My pal and I talked about this happening over three years ago, when Korea…
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Fido’s Assmaker
The main reason I didn’t feel like posting until today was: Yowch. This isn’t me by the way, I just took the picture. As you can see, I must have made a fine pinhole camera out of a beer can. Not that I remember it that well. As a week early birthday present, we took Bill away from his bar in Nara in order to take him to, you guessed it, another bar. Tramp’s bar in Osaka, where I hadn’t been to for years, but where happy hour is still 180 minutes long. It was a great night, but reminiscing about it in detail still makes me slightly ill. To…
