Asking why Crown Princess Masako had a nervous breakdown is like asking why they kept Emperor Showa on life support for so goddamn long. Subjugated people in general, but especially the Japanese, demand their leaders show a little frailty. Otherwise they’d never be on fucking TV.
Category: Society & Culture
Our NOBLE – and INTELLIGENT – friends, the fish, are SCREAMING!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
No wonder Jaws had such gnarly anger management issues.
Volunteer line for the ASPCF starts here.
Update: “…and there he saw a mock. It wasn’t a MOCK! It was a MOCK LOBSTER!”
The good leaf
Now that the excitement is over, I suggest everyone have a nice bit of something leafy, settle back, and relax a bit. The ultra-right gloating and the ultra-left whining is too much to bear. It’s all about taking a middle path, dudes.
Tunnel Vision
My surfing is limited to one page today:
http://news.yahoo.com/elections
refresh, refresh, refresh
Regular blogging here will resume when people (including myself) start to give a rat’s ass again and can turn on the TV without compulsively flicking to CNN every 30 seconds.
Lazy Travel Writers
Taken from a newsletter found in my inbox today:
Here are (sic) some advice from travelers who have been to Japan in the past:
“Do as Japanese do”
Holy shit, is that the best you can do? Yeah, eat raw sea cows and putrefying fish guts, shit your guts out while squatting over a dank smelly hole in the ground, then jack off to hentai anime with your parents sleeping in the next room, separated only by a sliding rice paper door.
“Do as Japanese do?” No wonder I despise travel writers and guide books so fucking much. That’s the laziest fucking advice I’ve ever heard.
Buddha: 1, Disney: 0
I love the sweet smell of vindication in the morning. Now that we have them on the retreat, let us remember why it came to this, why we hates them so, my precioussssssss: LINK
Until this abomination is corrected and pirate grabassery is returned to its former glory, for us the song remains the same:
YO-HO YO-HO
UNPUSSIFY THE PIRATES FOR ME!
Movie Review: Van Helsing
Anna had nice tits.
I can’t believe it never occurred to me
As a visitor to Japan, surely, the worst possible (nick)name you could have is “Huck.”
$5 a mile is the least of it
If you have ever had an accident with a cab in Japan, chances are you have been screwed. The reason? Cab companies often rely on mafia-controlled insurance vendors to do their negotiations. I won’t hear any bullshit about this, either – if you don’t believe me, try getting rear-ended by a taxi and see who ends up with the short end of the stick. I know a guy whose parked car was totalled by a speeding cab in Kyoto – he didn’t like how the insurance companies settled things (he ended up receiving around 100,000 yen [around a grand] toward the purchase of a new car) so he took the cab company to court. He ended up dropping the case after having his new car burned, dead animals stuffed in his mailbox, and being threatened on the phone and finally, in person, by scarfaced thugs in black suits. Of course, the police were a big help through all of this and he had to pay a princely sum for repair of the parking lot and the mailbox, etc. The kicker, though, is that the cab company apparently sent him a pretty book of coupons for free rides after he dropped the case.
Ouch.
Needless to say, said acquaintance left Japan long ago. I dropped an e-mail to him last week and apparently he’s having kinda-related problems in China now. Some people never learn (j/k dude!).
For all of you with experience in Japan, I’d like you to think about something:
How many times have you seen a cab pulled over by the cops in Japan?
In my decade of living here, I have never seen this once, and believe me, I’ve seen cabs do some pretty egregious shit. That tells me something. Yes, it does. All repeat after me: I bewieve it’s a conspiwacy!
And don’t give me that “cabbies need a special driver’s license to operate” crap, I’ve seen truckers with the same licenses pulled over (albeit this is fairly rare, too); I’ve even seen a daiko unten car (a driving service that takes you and your car home – handy when you’ve had some drinks and don’t want to pay the minimum $3,000 fine for DUI) get tagged for following the lead car and running a stop sign (daiko unten drivers also have a “special” license).
BTW, I am sympathetic to the cabbies themselves – they have a hard job and some of them do it with a special kind of passion that can change the outcome of an entire visit to other cities. I’m just sick of their criminal masters and the free passes they get from the cops. If there is any justice in the world, I will see a taxi getting a ticket from cops right in the middle of a red light district where the cops were turning hookers and mama-sans out into the street, sometime before I leave Japan.
Near Miss
To the old lady who decided to suddenly step out in front of traffic without looking first this morning: My parking brake saved your life, but I believe you may need to change those Depends.
This is not the first time my parking brake saved me from a collision, but I hope it’s the last; the narrow streets of Japan call for this maneuver and I truly believe it should be taught in driving school, although the brunt of the natives have a hard time even remembering which is the “go forward” pedal, so…