Category: Chillin’

Thanks to all you truly compassionate friends and readers who have sent me this over the past couple weeks – HAHA… But the joke’s on you, because in less than a year’s time I’ll be living in the steamy jungles of SE Asia, building my army of monkeys and surveying a nice spot for my teak plantation while my wife teaches all day at the university… I’ll think of you all fondly then.

Someone was cool enough to rip three entire seasons of Beavis & Butthead and upload to mininova. The thing is, all the music videos are edited out so each episode is less than ten minutes long, and the guys are left head banging and air guitaring to… nothing!
What’s the point?
Serious letdown.

Just gotta say that this movie and Sin City have semi-restored my faith in Hollywood. I downloaded the rip (mad props to the FiCO CREW) but liked it so much I’ll buy the DVD just for the extras. I miss Los Angeles (well, the taco trucks at least).

It’s like the greatest toilet reading material of all time. After all, what’s more depressing than reading about those in search of punk as you take a short respite from your normal, white collar salaryman existence (until you remember that this is existence is actually pretty damn unusual for an American). Anyway, it’s been a steady diet of Cometbus for the past couple weeks, since the last of my post-WWII Japan books ran out. I’m still very interested in that subject, but have pretty much run out of the good material on it. Nothing left now but to write a book on it.

It makes perfect sense that true vampire bats are neither:
A. (exclusively) frugiverous, or
B. (exclusively) insectivorous
That is all.
//
Note: An alternative title to this post is, “Why I love the Discovery Channel,” but I really am reading a journal of an early explorer: Head Hunters of the Amazon: Seven Years of Exploration and Adventure
(Thanks to Y0j1mb0 for the link)

My fiane is currently finishing her doctorate at Osaka University in the field of linguistics, which we both studied at Tenri University. She is writing her dissertation about Molam (alternatively spelled, “Morlum,” or, “Mawlum”) which is a traditional form of Northeast Thai singing, originally from Laos. I’ve been translating excerpts and summaries into English (from Japanese) for her along the way, and have really gotten interested in the actual music while looking for what’s available online for her.
I discovered that most interesting aspect of this music for me is that it sounds a lot like rap! It’s hard to explain? But there are definitely some similarities in the verse and song structure there. And while turning on some of the Molam grooves today to get in the mood for another translation Nam asked me to do, I decided to learn a freestyle verse that sounds particularly hip-hop?
I’ve been working on Nam’s translation for four hours now, and I’ve only done two lines, mainly because I’ve been trying to memorize this one particular Molam verse and it’s driving me crazy:
Soi Soi / lao phi nong fang Soi /
Phen bo khao baan phen / go tang khao baan to /
So baan to / go tang to baan phen /
Jang bo khao baan phen / go tang khao baan to /
Pro waa roa yuu khon la baan
I’m doing some serious tongue-twisting here. Knowing quite well that I sound like a retarded campuchean goat while practicing this out loud, I pretend not to hear Nam yelling at me to stop in the background. I WILL get this down. Because I am destined to be the King of Thai Country Groove.
More later, if Nam doesn’t kill me.

Hey, I just realized that George Takei’s face really reminds me of my uncle Tosh… But in a way I can’t really put my finger on. Maybe it’s the bone structure or something, but I’m telling you, if George put on that “Kimchee Power” t-shirt that my uncle used to wear on our trips to Lake Powell, it just might fool you.
It seems my uncle and Mr. Takei shared similar experiences growing up, as well.
(article via)

The girl’s PC died a couple weeks ago so I decided to piece together a new one from a mix of old parts and new, which was both fun and worrying, as always. I was mostly worried about having to buy another copy of Win XP (Professional, because I have bad luck with Home), since I kind of assumed authentication would be denied since the new PC had a new motherboard, chipset, and CPU (went from old SiS chipset/Athlon XP 1800 to Intel 865PE/Celeron 2.4). Hoping for the best, however, I built up the box with as many of the previous components as possible:
2 PC2100 DIMMS
Optical drive
GF Ti300 graphics card
Firewire PCI card
HD with WinXP still installed
I intended to switch out the memory and HD for more recent and appropriate offerings after trying authentication once just for the hell of it. Well, I slapped it all together and fired her up and…. I’ll be damned! My first surprise was that XP started right up and auto-installed a crapload of new drivers, but hasn’t experienced any trouble like I expected – it went straight from one chipset to another without a hitch, adapting to its new nervous system like some cybernetic super-being, whereas I thought it would surely cry foul and curl up like a sniveling little bitch in a corner somewhere.
The second surprise is that authentication worked! It accepted the serial I used on the previous machine and brought an OK back from Microsoft Japan – excellent! So basically, to summarize, Bill Gates made a product that worked much better than I expected -AND- I got to fuck him out of a couple hundred bucks for doing so! (because one IS obligated to purchase a new version of Win XP for every computer they install it on – when your PC dies, so does the license for the OS.)
So. The moral of this story is: The parameters of the much-vaunted “hardware hash” used for Windows XP verification are not all that hard to fool. You can switch mobo, chipset, and CPU without having to make Microsoft richer (I specifically wrote this entry because I couldn’t find one like it a couple weeks ago).
THE END

As I blogged a few weeks ago, my faithful refrigerator suddenly died, and I have since been experimenting on living without one. You see, a dead refrigerator, TV, A/C, or washing machine has become a major pain in the ass to get rid of in Japan. Since last March or so, new legislation prohibits us putting out such major appliances on Big Trash day. There isn’t even a junkyard or recycle center we can dump such items off at (in my city, at least). The main thing preventing me from getting a new refrigerator was, in fact, figuring out what to do with the old one.
As it turns out, this particular problem is solved like almost any other serious one encountered in Japan:
A. The proper way, with lots of paperwork and money, or
B. The sneaky way, AKA The Gaijin Way, which usually entails bending or flagrantly shitting all over the law
So those that know me well may be surprised to learn that I filled out all the forms for the privilege of paying more than 7,000 yen ($70) in pick-up and recycling fees for my dead refrigerator, and it’s not even a full-sized model! The fees don’t take size or weight into account, only the manufacturer (the sign at the electronics store where I went to fill out the forms said that models made by certain manufacturers cost 1,000+ yen more to recycle). Of course, my only other option to actually ponying up the cash to “recycle” my broken chilly fucker was to illegally dump it, which never would have bothered me in, say, the Osaka slums or in back of my old university, where it would have rusted into oblivion without ever bothering anybody. Back home in SoCal, a single phone call would have summoned a crew of orange-vested immigrants on a beat up truck with county tags to take away any old appliance for free. Hell, in Bangkok I could put it out on the curb and it would be gone (for real recycling) in less than an hour, I’m sure. But I live on a beautiful island right now, and somehow, it made me think twice before loading it up to deep six somewhere.
So basically, the cost entailed with my act of environmental responsibility was around $70. I’m still trying to figure out if it was worth it… In a way, I feel fucking played by the government again, I tell you. I want to know exactly how this fridge is going to be “recycled.” Maybe it was a stupid decision – by the number of appliances I see dumped up in the hills around here, I can tell you that many of my neighbors sure think so… In a truly just world, my children would grow up around dolphins and wildflowers, and my neighbors would live in a polluted world of nighmarish leaked-biotoxin nuclear winterlike suffocation, but be $70 richer.

It seems my faithful, undersized refrigerator has died on me. Everything in the freezer thawed out and a kind of primordial sludge leaked out when I opened the door. NASTY. Oh well, at least I found out what that frozen mystery clump was in the back of the freezer (a bag of shrimp from three years ago). I threw everything out as a kind of rebirthing ritual. Even the tupperware went. Didn’t think twice about it, either. I guess “baching it” has some benefits, cause I would never in a thousand years get away with that shit if my woman was here.
Well, I guess I have to buy a new undersized refrigerator when I get back from Thailand. Not enough time to deal with it before I go.