Today’s New Word is: Applicosinox. Applicosinox made its debut about five years ago in a song recorded by Taro and I in his old juku (cram school). I made it up to fill a particular line in the song and it fit perfectly. Applicosinox is spiced wine made from apples that makes your nose itch and causes sneezing if you drink too much. On the plus side, your eyes start glowing like Dune if you drink more than a cup a day.
A search for this word on Google used to return a lot more hits than it does now. In particular, I remember it being researched on a linguistics department website of some university in Tokushima. Wonder where all that went…
Author: Justin
Meat Conspiracy
Do you realize how hard it is to keep up with a no-carb diet right now in Japan? There are problems with all four of my food groups!
Beef: Australian is the only beef available in quantity but the grade of meat they are importing has the texture of reconstituted beef jerky.
Pork: Pork has always suffered a stigma here, and it sounds like they are going to stop the import of American pork due to the mad cow scare. (I was going to write a joke about increased imports of Canadian pork here but I got engrossed in this page instead. Too bad.)
Chicken: Goddamn avian flu coupled with in-country corruption (they just busted a local hatchery for selling laying hens to butcher shops!) means that eggs and rows upon rows of possibly tainted fowl were the only goddamn meat product available at the store today. And the egg section was plastered with recall notices for lead-tainted eggs they sold last week!
Fish: Smaller, more expensive, increasingly frozen, and more likely to be farmed than caught lately.
Maybe the trees really are screaming.
I ate the last of the lamb chops I squirreled away last week for dinner. Oh, tofu also. Shit, I even ate a pack of natto, so I guess I’ll see what that does to my ketotes tomorrow when I do a test strip.
Lord Atkins in heaven, the natives of this savage land have forsaken me! Send me some lobster and steak dinners, stat!
Mudgrubber
On the way home from field archery a few months ago, I spotted this bad boy about to get squished on the road. We took him home for lack of a good place to release him, and I snapped this shot with the Nikon in one hand and steering wheel in the other. (On a scale of difficulty, it was somewhere between eating a Big Mac and changing a CD while driving.)
Anyway, Mr. Turtle got to play in my bathtub for a few hours and he surprised us all by screeching the entire time. Yes, it’s true. Turtles screech. Eeek eeeeek eeeeeeeek. So the next time some hippie starts crying about the trees screaming (as opposed to the Screaming Trees), you can tell him it was probably just a turtle he stepped on.
New Word Primer
Well I thought of a new pursuit and went ahead with it before it escaped my memory (volatile). Now I should explain: When learning a new language, I often experience meltdown trying to think of the English equivalent of a particular word or phrase. Since I am a product of American public schools (K-12) and Japanese university, I am pretty much the stupidest, laziest, least-inclined-to-use-a-dictionary fool you will ever meet. Hence, my need to create new words, even if they already exist. OK?
FAQ:
Q. Can your New Words be used for free?
A. No. Every spoken usage costs a beer. Every written usage costs a car (scaled to wealth of individual; Bill Gates can afford a lousy Maybach, etc.). Corporate usage is banned unless your company markets trendy fruits such as the pitaya to medium-sized co-op grocery chains in the northwest.
Q. Are volume discounts available?
A. See your monthly statement and perform a quick scalpulation.
Q. I represent so-and-so publishing. May we include your New Words in our dictionary/linguistics journal/”Asshat Central” project listing?
A. Yes, but please include the following tagline: –> k0zBu 0NZ J00!
Q. What if you create a word but it already exists?
A. It becomes mine by default.
Q. Won’t that enable you to claim the entire English language as your own?
A. Heh.
Q. This sounds like complete BS, just how many people do you expect to pay you to use the English language?
A. My Nigerian mentor, Roberl Dungabe, says “plenty.”
Scalpulation
The new word for today is “scalpulation.” Scalpulation is an answer or calculation derived by much head-scratching, chin-fondling, and mutterings of the word “Um”.
OK, just one more…
Why stop when I’m on a roll?
Meet Dudley Hiibel. He’s a 59 year old cowboy who owns a small ranch outside of Winnemucca, Nevada. He lives a simple life, but he’s his own man. You probably never would have heard of Dudley Hiibel if it weren’t for his belief in the U.S. Constitution.
One balmy May evening back in 2000, Dudley was standing around minding his own business when all of a sudden, a policeman pulled-up and demanded that Dudley produce his ID. Dudley, having done nothing wrong, declined. He was arrested and charged with “failure to cooperate” for refusing to show ID on demand. And it’s all on video.
On the 22nd of March 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether Dudley and the rest of us live in a free society, or in a country where we must show “the papers” whenever a cop demands them.
Eeeenteresting, no? I haven’t read it all yet. Go see for yourself, I’m busy working:
http://papersplease.org/hiibel/
ALSO:
Beware of Big Brother’s spies – they’re everywhere!
CSS Zen Garden / Hangame Japan
Now that I have a legion of troopers aspiring to find the One True Way for their site design, I present a Scroll of Knowledge:
http://csszengarden.com
Hurry up and click already.
//
For the troops on furlough, I present the best and most addictive free game site in all of Japan. I’m talking original MMPORG (if you now what that abbreviation means, you are a fucking nerd. like me.), card games like poker and hanafuda, mah-jong, pachinko, etc. etc. etc.:
HANGAME Japan
I think the parent company is one of the biggie Korean portal sites like Daum. John and his wife got me hooked on Korean hanafuda (called “Go Stop”) last year on Daum, but I couldn’t play because in order to sign up, you pretty much must emit kimchi stench from your pores and hate American GIs (even though they are the only reason that crazy Kim motherfucker and his starving hordes aren’t gnawing off your arms after a massive artillery barrage). I guess what I’m trying to say is, you need a Korean citizen’s ID# to sign up for that shit and I don’t have one and can’t be bothered to research faking one. So I looked around for approximately 1.4672 hours and although I found many free hanafuda games online, they all suxx0r3d compared to the Daum Go Stop game.
Then I found the Japanese HANGAME site. It rocks. I played more hanafuda this week than CS. Oh. My. God. Don’t worry, I’ll make up for it tonight. Gotta try out those newly powered-up Beretta Elites that Steam made it a point to tweak.
If you read this whole post and understood every reference that was made, you are a pathetic game-otaku webhead geek. Join my HANGAME group after signup. My handles are “cyberdogma” and “cosmicbuddha”. Very original, I know. STFU.
Oh, if you care to learn about hanafuda, look at this pathetic nerd’s site:
sloperama.com
That is all for today. I have been pretending to be working on the new export regulation checklist since this morning and I need a break before I turn in some half-ass initial draft. It’s only hours before I will go home, yell “wooo, it’s Fridaaaaay!” at the cats that are sitting on my street, unlock my door, sit on the sofa, then wonder how the hell I slept so long when I wake up 48 hours later.
Look wot I can do!
Wow. I just wrote the PERFECT POST here and lost it when I accidentally closed the browser window. Hooray for me!
No, I will not attempt to recreate it. That would be like trying to top my harshest drinking record (16 Spirytus shots) – maybe possible, but not without great suffering.
Speaking of Spirytus, I just found out from the distributor’s site that the shit isn’t really meant for drinking as-is (as if we didn’t know before):
Poland is a big, world producer of spirit obtained by the fermentation of grain or potatoes. The purification of the spirit is made by rectification in modern automated plants. Spirit obtained in this way is of an ideal purity; it is natural and serves as the basis of Polish vodka, world famous for their high quality. It is sought by consumers in order to make home made infusions of fruits and for healing purposes.
Me and Bill should be veritable doctors by now judging from all the “healing” we’ve practiced over the years.
Although the site lists the existence of a sissy brother (151 proof), I’ve only ever seen the real deal – 96% alcohol, baby. Why the fuck would they want to copy Ronrico with that half-percentage point 151 proof figure anyway? For those in the know, there can be no substitute. Spirytus separates the men from the boys, everytime.
Classical Thai Dance
Right now I’m sipping lemon chu-hi at Bill’s Bar and going through my photos from the Thai dance exhibition Nam participated in last week. Pictured here is a Japanese girl who is quite skilled and actually teaches others classical Thai dance. The dance group is comprised of both Japanese and Thai girls, and they perform all around Japan.
I am waiting for the new Nikon D70 DSLR to be released and push down the price of the Canon Digital Rebel so I can buy a digicam that works better in low-light situations than my Coolpix 4500. I love the 4500 but it sucks for night/low-light pics. The Canon apparently does quite well. Hell, if the D70 looks good I might eventually go for that… I don’t know if I can wait for the next generation cameras to come out. After all, the waiting game tends to get tedious for me and with each product cycle my patience wears a bit thinner.
I like photography a lot, but I often wonder if I should spend more time on technique. I think I could really get into it but I worry that it would affect the fun I have now. It’s rewarding to be in the middle of learning the basics and still produce results I’m satisfied with, say once every 200 shots or so. Digital cameras are so liberating for me. I erase at least half of the photos I take before they ever leave the camera, and I don’t think anything of it. If I were using film, I know I wouldn’t take a lot of the shots I experiment with now because of cost.
Why is this so important to me at 3AM? Everyone else here in the bar is wasted or borderline comatose… Time to go now that the police running the sobriety checkpoints have packed up for the night.
Gyudon Pics
At the request of a certain hominid (and I suspect a fellow chowhound), I present borrowed gyudon pics.
Here we have the gyudon (center), miso soup (right), pickled cabbage (left), and a cup of hot green tea in the blue cup. This is a set meal that was available at Yoshinoya stores in Japan for about 600 yen until the American cows went apeshit or whatever. Basically the only thing missing from this photo is the raw egg. Not very photogenic, I guess.
First of all, whoever took this photo has to work on their color management because the red ginger looks like shredded carrots. Shame, shame. Please take better photos for me to borrow next time! Ah, well, at least your heart is in the right place… I never even thought of taking pictures at Yoshinoya because I was too busy stuffing my face. This photo was taken at a Yoshinoya in the US. Even without the telltale English text on the placemat and napkin, you can tell by the styrofoam bowl which is used even for “for here” orders in the states. Not as elegant as the Japanese bowls, but somewhat comforting in its assumed sterility. American portions are larger than their Japanese counterparts of course. Also, from the beginning, the American stores have featured a Chicken Teriyaki Bowl and Combo Bowls with oth chicken and beef, items that the Japanese stores still do not feature to this day.
It’s past midnight, and my stomach is rumbling from remembering this stuff.