Category: Chillin’

(Click image to enlarge)
Are you a real ninja, or have you ever wanted to become one?
Find out by reading this book (zipped PDF file; this download will self-destruct when enough of you become adept at walking on water).

The path I have chosen is the very model of assimilation into broader culture.
– My blood is nearly 100% Japanese (whatever the hell that means), although I may have some Russian blood in me as well (that would explain my fondness for vodka and the occasional rogue orange whisker that sprouts from my chin).
– My children will be of (nearly) 50% Japanese ancestry.
– My grandchildren will be mostly machine, but partially designed in Japan.
UPDATE: In a parallel history, my Japanese bloodlines have already disappeared due to a nefarious government plot.
Fuckers!

In Japan:
– Do you wear shoes inside your home in America?
> (…my mom would have a cow.)
– Would you like to try a slice of Salmon Cream Pizza?
> (…get that nasty shit away from me. squid, seaweed, and most other stuff from the sea have no fucking business on a pizza. fucking heathens.)
– Do you want to come to karaoke?
> (…i think i’ll have to miss out on this round of Drunken Asshole Vanity)
– Do you want to play sex?
> (…no, i’m waiting till i get married. plus, i don’t know how to say “double bagger” in japanese.)
– How do you do?
> (…oops, of course i meant, “fine, thank you. and you?”)
In America:
– Why do people take their shoes off before entering a house in Japan?
> (…tatami doesn’t quite clean the dog shit off your shoes like carpet does.)
– Have you tried our New Caribbean MexiChili Teriyaki Sushi-eggroll Low-carb Wrap?
> (…Let me repeat: oh, fuck no.)
– Can you spare a dollar?
> (…you may think my response severe, but the last bum i actually had a conversation with punched me in the throat. he ruined it for all you assholes.)
– Can we search your car?
> (…oops mr. officer, that just slipped out, what i meant to say was, “sure!”)
– Do you want to come to karaoke?
> (…)
///
to be continued…

Description: This feature automatically appends the phrase “, you fucking idiot(s)” to every sentence you write. This feature is toggled ON by scowling or narrowing of eyes (as interpreted by facial recognition software), and OFF by slamming your fist through the computer screen.
Default Setting: ON

It seems like the rumors about a movie version of Snow Crash from a few years back have basically disappeared. If so, good. I have zero faith in Hollywood being able to create anything even remotely as good as the book. Plus, there’s the whole half-black, half-asian protagonist thing to work out – more than likely, they’d devise some brilliant way around it involving Tom Cruise, eyelid glue, and a can of creosote.
//
Zero faith. Heh. Reminds me of a planning company I used to pass every day on the way to work, near Nam’s old apartment in Tamade (Osaka): ZERO PLANNING.

I just figured out why I loved Google Earth so much from the very first time I tried it. The concept and the interface were already planted in my brain:

Earth materializes, rotating majestically in front of his face. Hiro reaches out and grabs it. He twists it around so he’s looking at Oregon. Tells it to get rid of the clouds, and it does, giving him a crystalline view of the mountains and the seashore…
…Hiro looks up, focuses his gaze on Earth, zooms in for a look. As he gets closer, the imagery he’s looking at shifts from the long-range pictures coming in from the geosynchronous satellites to the good stuff being spewed into the CIC computer from a whole fleet of low-flying spy birds. The view he’s looking at is a mosaic of images shot no more than a few hours ago.

I’m reading Snow Crash again for the first time in few years. I do this partly out of habit every once in a while, the same as watching the Blues Brothers for the twentieth or thirtieth time, but also because its a damn good read.
I’ve realized partway through, this time, that a lot of what Neal Stephenson envisioned in this book has actually materialized in the real world. Perhaps the items I refer to were actually being developed when he wrote the book, but just off the top of my head, in the last year alone I have read about the commercialization of products that could be considered real-world equivalents of Snow Crash technology: The Earth program mentioned above, advanced crash suits/collars for motorcyclists, dentatas (Latin for “toothed vagina”), gargoyles (wearable or implanted computer enhancements), loogie guns.
Next on my personal wish list: Rat things, the Deliverator’s ride, and Reason v1.1.

Just saw a fire engine red Ferrari Testarossa rear-end a red fire engine. If that ain’t poetic justice, I don’t know what is. The Ferrari driver was, of course, a big, fat wanker who got out and started yelling at the firemen.
I made sure to laugh hard enough so he could hear me.

When I feel kind of weird and sad, I whisper songs in Spanish to myself. The thing is, I only really know one song in Spanish besides the usual karaoke fare.
Yo s?lo quiero mirar los campos,
yo s?lo quiero cantar mi canto,
pero no quiero cantar solito,
yo quiero un coro de pajaritos.
[Coro:]
Quiero llevar este canto amigo
a qui?n lo pudiera necesitar
Yo quiero tener un mill?n de amigos
y as? m?s fuerte poder cantar.
Yo quiero tener un mill?n de amigos
y as? m?s fuerte poder cantar.
Yo s?lo quiero un viento fuerte,
llevar mi barco con rumbo norte,
y en el trayecto voy a pescar
para dividir luego al arribar.
(Coro)
Yo quiero creer la paz del futuro
quiero tener un hogar seguro.
Quiero a mi hijo pisando firme,
cantando alto, sonriendo libre.
(Coro)
Yo quiero amor siempre en esta vida,
sentir calor de una mano amiga,
quiero a mi hermano sonrisa al viento,
verlo llorar pero de contento.
(Coro)
Venga conmigo a ver los campos
cante conmigo tambi?n mi canto
pero no quiero cantar solito
yo quiero un coro de pajaritos
(Coro)

That is all.

Since rescuing Yoda the kitten last year, I have grown fonder of cats in general. We grew up with many cats as pets and we loved them as part of the family, but I never really liked other peoples cats or strays, of which my neighborhood in rural Japan is absolutely full (there are constantly between ten to fifteen strays on my street lined with only 20 or so houses). Cats, by nature, are selfish and pretty much endearing only to their owners – kind of like sports cars, except they are not especially benefitted by lugubrious waxing (I assume). What I’m trying to get at is that I’m cool with keeping cats as pets, but I can’t stand “cat people.” You know, the kind of people who keep 50 cats in their house and have to be dug out of caked up cat shit, hairballs, etc. by rescue teams after their neighbors complain about the smell for a few years straight. This is a kind of sickness in my book. Cat people were probably dogs in their past life, doing pennance in this one for all their past feline-chasing.
And there’s always a cat person at work, isn’t there? The lady with a cat-themed desk calendar, a closeup of a cat’s face set as her desktop background, who seems to shed cat fur everywhere and, should her boyfriend (another cat person, natch) playfully slap her ass, would most definitely answer with a passionate meow. The thing is, I’m usually indifferent to this kind of shit. Doesn’t faze me – cat people can be annoying, but they are generally nice and easy to please (just compliment the pictures of cats adorning their desk).
Today, however, I ran into a cat person who ruined my relationship with all cat people. The subject of our group conversation was a recent news item, how a driver in Shizuoka swerved to avoid hitting a cat and plowed into a line of nursery school children (story here). Standard reaction to this story, as you would expect, is that the driver is a dumbfuck. Or that maybe it was just his reflexes, reaction that caused it. Or that there were extenuating circumstances, etc., etc., etc.
What I did not expect was to hear was a stupid cat person defending the driver’s actions, as in, “nobody was killed and the cat presumably survived, so it all worked out in the end.” I was floored. I mean, you gotta be fucking kidding, right? Just do the math – 36 nursery school kids vs. one cat! Shit, even reverse that – 36 kittens vs. a single human being – and a normal person would opt to make kitty paste on the sidewalk every single time! No fucking question!
In the ensuing conversation, the cat person started to cry when I said she had no business driving a car. And since the cat person is a girl, her harpy friends all ganged up on me. Hey, I was just trying to drag her into the real world! They said, she is such a nice person, how could you scold her like that. And they called me a cat hater. Get your shit straight, you foul harpies. I am not a cat hater.
I am a cat-person hater. Meow that, bitches.

Has anyone else ever received extras in their shipment from Amazon? I ordered a couple of music CDs a while back and when they finally came a couple weeks ago in those new soft cardboard shipping sleeves that Amazon (JP) just started using, there were a couple of completely unrelated J-Pop CDs included in it (combined retail value: over 5,000 yen).
Has this ever happened to anyone else? Is god trying to make me like J-Pop?
Another huge Amazon annoyance is that half of the shit I ever order from them never comes through – first comes the e-mail that they are out of stock and the item is on backorder, then comes a message a month later that it is taking longer than expected. Finally, a few months after the initial order I receive a notice that the item is unobtainable and that Amazon is cancelling my order for it, sorry to have made you wait an entire fiscal quarter for the rest of the shit in the order, fuck you very much and have a nice day. I don’t know if this is because my taste in books is fairly obscure (Sphinctral Polyp Rituals of the West Indies) or because Amazon are a bunch of incompetent fucks, but it is irritating as hell.
Damn you, Jeff Bezos!