Category: Exploits

When I first moved out here to Awajishima, I was as prepared for the lifestyle changes as one can be moving from the inner city slum that is Nishinari (the area of Osaka famous for its troubled history,especially the riots that occurred there in 1990) to a city with a total population of 40,000 (and like the rest of Japan, shrinking).
An early indicator of the trouble I would face here was the list of ten real estate agents my new company provided me. Upon calling every agent on the list, six were no longer in business, two told me there were no rooms to rent, and only the last two had rentals to show me. I ended up choosing the newest of the lot, a two-story lot house with enough space for a bachelor to assign specific roles to various upstairs rooms (i.e., “the not-yet-unpacked box room,” “the walk-in closet,” “the network vault/musical instrument chamber”). It it this last room that I am writing about today.
It started out with my 10baseT hub and hacked AirPort for sharing a dual ISDN connection plus a couple acoustic guitars: An old Yamaha (yes, the motorcycle company) and an even older Suzuki (yes, the violin company) with black flamenco strings. It quickly became home for a djembe, an ashiko, and several other “neighbor-irritants.” It also featured subsequent network and internet connection upgrades, from 10- to 100- to 1,000-baseT, and the jumps from 1.5 and 8Mbps ADSL to 100Mbps FTTH, as well as the wireless jumps from 802.11b to enhanced b, g, a, and finally b/g/a. But I digress with this nerdy shit; I’m focusing on the musical stuff today (besides, all the network stuff is downstairs now since I pinched off the upstairs phone line to decrease line noise). Anyway, it was basically a couple stringed instuments and various drums, plus the usual assortment of blues harps, kazoos, etc.
It occurred to me this morning as I stubbed my toe on a koto that those first-level instruments have been multiplying like rabbits, and something must be done before they take over my house completely. You see, in five years they have steadily been overflowing from that single room to all other upstairs rooms, to the wide corner stair on my staircase, all the way down into my entry hall and into the computer/living room. In five years, on this desolate and remote island I have somehow acquired:
– One hand-carved sitar from Nepal (had to have one; I never play it but might put pickups on it)
– Two more Hohner Blues Harps (they get crusty with spittle if you don’t clean them after playing drunk)
– One Chinese-made harmonica (playing this gives me more blues than the authentic Blues Harps)
– Various castanets and shakers (these all belong to Taro, who sheds/forgets musical detritus like this wherever he goes)
– Another mini hand drum (No fucking idea where this came from)
– A hand-made theremin (mail order from the states, a fucking rip off at $200)
– A Taisho-koto (for lack of a better explanation, a Japanese autoharp)
– Two full-size kotos (I like sleeping next to these because I can wake up, pluck a couple strings, and be happy for some reason, although I stub my toe on them all the time)
– 5 or 6 shittily-made wooden flutes with rainbow airbrushing which people think it’s a good reason to buy in third world countries for like ten cents each and distribute as presents when they get home. Fucking tourist scum (thanks for the presents, y’all!).
Not that I can fucking play any of these instruments proficiently or actually read music or actually practice with my band or anything, but I figure as long as I have instruments and none of us dies, I can still claim we are a band… We are going to make a comeback like the fucking Eagles, dude (and barring that, at least like the Doors).

Between the damage done by the typhoon last week and a freak wave of work that slammed over my desk quite unexpectedly, I just haven’t felt like writing lately.
It’s kinda depressing driving around because the traffic is really bad – the drive to work usually takes less than 15 minutes, but now it takes up to an hour. Last week I mentioned that a couple bridges had broken, but it turns out that several more suffered structural damage that wasn’t seen at first and have since been closed to traffic. Road conditions have been appalling – the thick layers of river silt on the asphalt dried out the first few days after the typhoon, which of course resulted in terrific dust storms kicked up by traffic. Then it started raining again yesterday, resetting the cycle of state change. The downpour lasted for a full day and had several predictable yet wholly unwelcome effects. Drying mud that had been piled to the side of roads and buildings for later removal (recycling?) slowly reverted to sludge, seeping outward once again. Great piles of trash consisting of shorted appliances, waterlogged tatamis, and soiled books, clothes, and furniture of every shape and size but of uniform color (cafe au lait), all the refuse discarded by the those whose homes were ruined, grew heavy with water and toppled into the streets, swimming in the pools of freshly liberated mud.
And that’s about all I want to say at this point. What can I say? I can only wax mad about mud for so long before it starts affecting my mood since, you know, I feel like I’m living in it. But that’s hardly fair – my house wasn’t even damaged. I met up with my personnel manager today, and she really was living in caveman conditions until yesterday, when they used a firehose to clear her house of mud. I asked if I could lend a hand in some way, but she said that unless I had some brilliant way to make her insurance company cover damages instead of using the fine print to fuck her, no (but39-4asking).
The river overflowing had one positive effect that I can see, the rice paddies are positively EXPRODING with crop! Never mind that it’s probably too late to harvest, the vibrant green patches dotting the muted landscape nicely break up the monotony and have gained my respect: Rice plants are some seriously tough, photosynthesizin’-ass playaz. And as an added bonus, I now know what an Egyptian farmer must feel like.

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?

Ouch. This person obviously chose the wrong career – I’m thinking Corrections Officer would have been more appropriate.
My second year in Japan, I got in a fairly serious accident while riding to work on my motor scooter. A small car ran a stop sign right in front of me. I crashed into its side and flew over the hood into a drained rice field, gasping for breath as the wind had been knocked out of me. I passed out and woke up during the ambulance ride to Tenri Hospital.
All in all, I felt relatively uninjured. They looked me over in the ER, checked especially for head trauma, and everything seemed fine until the doctor brought out the helmet I had been wearing and said I needed additional tests in broken English (I still couldn’t speak very much Japanese at the time). Looking at the helmet, I agreed: It had probably saved my life. The doctor took the dented, deformed hunk of plastic out of the room, and told me to follow him. When I asked where we were going, he looked back at me, dead serious, and said a single word: “Lobotomy.”
To this day, I have no idea if that fucker was joking or not (maybe – just maybe – he meant something else?), but at the time the shit wasn’t very funny.

Today I changed my car’s registration from Nara to Kobe. I don’t like the new number plates as much as the old ones – Kobe plates are a kind of status symbol in Kansai, much as Shinagawa plates are in Kanto. I have this nagging feeling that these plates might get me pulled over more often than the old Nara ones, although I can’t really explain why, it’s just a feeling I have (that I hope is never proved).
A few months ago I heard that Kobe plates illicitly exported from Japan were selling in LA for a pretty sum, mostly because of the Kobe Bryant case. In retrospect, I think the high price is justified; the process to get new plates in Japan is a colossal pain in the ass if you do it yourself (Most people just pay to have car shops do it for them; I did it by myself partly just to see if it was as a big a hassle as I imagined and I was not disappointed.)

From the Guardian: In a secret Paris cavern, the real underground cinema
In my third year of university here, my pal T came back from a two year journey all over the world, most recently Paris, with a crazy gypsy girlfriend in tow. She had red hair and crooked teeth, and although I never caught her doing it, I swear she had a little bag of bones she would occasionally toss into the ashes with which to determine the alignment of Jupiter or tomorrow’s chance of rain, or some such crap. Actually, she was pretty cool to hang out with because she made T act like a man sometimes, which is more than I can say for his sad, sorry, married ass now (sorry T, I call ’em as I see ’em). She eventually went back to France when her Japanese tourist visa expired, and I tagged along when Taro went to visit.
Imagine my surprise when I found out she was the most normal person in her entire group of friends (let me put it this way, I was even more surprised than T was when she came to met us at the airport with a totally new hairstyle – short hair now dyed black, with shoulder-length cornrow extensions she had done at an “African barbershop”). Her friends were essentially street kids. The night we got there, we rented a car and drove into the dark heart of the city to look for them on unmarked sidestreets. We found them in squatting at some funky construction site, accessible only by climbing under a chain link fence marked with the French equivalent of “No Trespassing.” It was a reunion with old friends for T, and I got to know everybody quickly. It was a true ghetto party, complete with trash can fires and sticky balls of black sin smuggled fresh from Nepal. At some point the whiskey ran out and bottles of wine were produced, only to reveal that nobody had a corkscrew, So someone brought out a hammer and the rest of the night was spent eating cold merguez sandwiches and gingerly sipping from bottles with broken necks (when I said ghetto, I meant it).
The reason any of this pertains to the link above is that I recall a conversation regarding the catacombs beneath the city. You see, T’s friends had this squatting stuff down to a science. Apparently, after buildings are condemned in certain disticts of Paris, they are essentially fair game for a whole year. They aren’t torn down, and the police don’t kick out squatters. So these kids were moving to freshly condemned buildings from year to year, although if picking got slim, they could always sleep “below the city.” At the time, I thought they were joking, but I guess the spooky catacombs are only a part of a huge tunnel network they have there… Dim lighting and gloomy rooms painted with religious symbols, eh? All I can think is, that sounds awfully like the Mines of Moria. My inner geek is urging me to find out what T’s ex is doing these days – that would be an awfully cool trip.
So what say you, T? There’s nothing like calling up an old flame out of the blue on behalf of a good friend’s inner geek, is there?
I’ll bring the corkscrew this time.

It removes inhibitions. I met this girl ten seconds ago. Bill (on the left) may have met her before, but how the hell do I know. She came in after my cousin Tait (who I have misspelled as “Tate” until now, sorry cuz) called her. Jeez, I have no idea what has happened since that Spirytus shot. I’ll shut up now, sorry.

This article at Slate caught my eye today:
One Giant Lift for Mankind: The race for the 1,000-pound bench press.
When I trained for football and wrestling in high school, I was happy to be able to bench 200. But ten times that? Half a ton? Even with the super redneck denim shirts or whatever, I fear these guys will only learn their limits when something gives out with a sickening snap. I know what too much weight on the bar feels like. It feels like your elbows might pop out. If you’re positioned poorly on the bench, you know it right away. Sometimes, the veins stand out on your forehead as you turn beet red and wish you hadn’t been stupid enough to try it without a spotter (or anyone within grunting or panicked yelping distance; how I survived my own stupidity all these years is a mystery). Steroid accusations and neck-deficiency issues aside, 1000 pounds is an amazing figure.
Anyway. You know how everyone at the gym jokes about the real muscleheads being able to lift cars that get in their way, etc., right? Standard jibes that denounce the practicality of being so big and so strong? I stopped making those jokes after a powerlifting guy that I knew got in a horrible car accident my junior year. What happened, in brief, was a frontal collision into the side of a (thankfully empty) school bus. Said person was driving with his seatbelt on, the car was a Honda Accord (no airbag), and there were no other passengers. Speed at time of collision was estimated between 35-45mph and according to witnesses, there was no time for him to brake.
Typically, this is a fatal scenario, with the steering column crushing the driver’s chest or perhaps the windshield exploding outward with the impact of the driver’s head. However, this guy survived against all odds. He was badly injured and hospitalized for months, but had survived an accident that should have been fatal. How did he do it?
According to his doctor, who conferred with the EMTs that worked the scene, the driver had avoided fatal injury because he had apparently bench pressed the steering wheel at time of impact. They had found him slumped over with his hands still gripping the wheel.
….
Sometimes I go to the hardware store and think about this when I look at the hammers. Never know when you’ll need a bigger hammer.

6. Life is flowing like water through my fingers. Time running out… Must adopt harried writing style. Also sentence fragments. And abrvi8… No wait that’s 13375p34K. So immature. Maybe I’ll just clean up my act and post only about politics.
6a. Nah, fuck that.
7. Why is it still so hard to surf true-believer political blogs and not feel slightly depressed afterward? (I bring this up because I suspect it only gets worse with age.)
7a. And why do politicians giving speeches on TV still look so much better when Hollywood does it? Can’t we get someone who sounds smarter than an actor on the fucking stage and in charge of really important shit that affects every aspect of our lives?
8. Car insurance gets cheaper in Japan when you turn 30. This is actually the second of two discount age levels for anything above legally required coverage. The first one is when you turn 26.
8a. Now this is not a huge amount of cash I’m talking about here, but with most people bitching at me to slow down (or to stop tailgating Porsche weenies who drive under the speed limit) all the time, it’s nice for someone to finally acknowledge my spotless driving record. Monetarily. The ironic thing is that I need to get coverage for all ages anyway if Adam wants to drive my car when he moves out here (later this week, BTW).
9. On balmy summer nights, Astrocreep 2000 is still the undefeated champion of impulsive gas pedal stomping on moonlit stretches of open highway.
9a. No I’m not shitting you. White Zombie was a great band, and Astrocreep 2K was absolutely phenomenal, although a couple of their songs on that album got way overplayed. This is how MTV and hit charts poison good bands (can anybody say “Frogstomp?”).
10. Mondays still suck, the people around me are still idiots, and in my ten year visit to this country, I have now sworn under my breath (in English so as not to be understood) at someone during a conversation approximately a hundred thousand million billion times.
10a. I’ve only been caught doing it a few times, once by a lady cop who was writing me up a bullshit parking ticket and apparently understood the words “fucking bitch.” I’d never been so scared my whole life as when she replied in perfect English, “what did you just call me?”, then called for backup.