Category: Society & Culture

A friend in marketing taught me this term the other day.
Chuppies = Chinese yuppies.
They are the next trendsetters.
God save us all.
My friend says anyone who is anyone in his field will give his left nut to be a major player in this demographic. Me? I went to school with Chuppies, only we didn’t call them that then. We called them sneaky, lying assholes with a twisted sense of Confucianism. Of course, we were just stupid kids, so….

You know those situations where you refrain from explaining something to somebody because you don’t think they’ll get it, then they turn out to understand it better than you do and you’re too embarassed to admit that you didn’t think they were capable of understanding it to begin with, which is already apparent to them anyway?
It makes you just want to go hide in a corner somewhere, especially if you kind of like that person… But sometimes it’s nice to confirm you’re just an asshole, like everybody else around you.

What is it with Asians giving themselves western names at the workplace? I work with Tommies, Jacks, Johns,etc., on a daily basis, yet these are all assumed names. More often than not, these are names that corporate English teachers or clients (that can’t pronounce native Japanese/Chinese names) have bestowed upon those in question.
Today, the G-man informed me of the best one we have heard to date. One of his wcorrespondents has dubbed himself Great Wang.
No shit, that’s what the guy calls himself; it’s even in the first part of his email address.
I don’t even know where to start analyzing something like this.
– I need one of this guy’s business cards. Just to be able to show it around.
– Will his assistants be known as Lesser Wangs?
– Anybody confident enough to wear Great Wang t-shirts? Tattoos?

Hanami is when Japanese people start acting like a bunch of Mexicans, laying around under trees and drinking beer. – Grinch-san, 2006
You know what? Grinch-san’s comment cracked me the fuck up. Can’t really refute what the man says. What I can say is that, once again, the weather has taken a turn for the worse during the sakura bloom again. We haven’t had good weather throughout the bloom for quite a few years now.
You know what bothers me about going to hanami more and more over the years? The number of gaijin twats. They aren’t acting like twats, mind you. They’re just being themselves.
/end hanami rant 2006

It’s always amusing to see columnists writing about places they’ve obviously never been: Clash of the superstores / Yamada Denki enters Osaka’s competitive electronics market
Basically, it’s hype like this that led us to take a trip down there yesterday. The night before was Adam’s birthday/farewell party in Umeda, and we stayed the night at a cheap hotel located in the illegalalienwhore district. As we all had some electronics shopping to do (a cranial implant here, a bionic limb augmentation there, you know, standard DenDen cyberware stuff), we decided to check out the vaunted new Yamada Denki complex (hereafter referred to as “Labia 1” – hey, they asked for it).
We arrived before 11 in the morning, only to face a bustling horde. Of sales staff. The place was deserted, as in, there were twice as many staff members as customers, which made for a truly annoying experience. The floor staff followed us around and incessantly offered to help with anything (“You looking to purchase LAN cable?”) until we wandered into the next area – where the next sales specialist was waiting (“Choosing the right mousepad is a critical life decision…”). Jesus.
To be that deserted exactly one month after opening day, on a weekend no less, is not a good sign. I predict this place will close in a few years, after several key management changes and obscure restructurings of the point card system, never having reached any of its lofty goals. The problem? See the title of this post.
True, the complex is theoretically a three minute walk from Namba station. The thing is, it’s a three minute walk toward the middle of nowhere, past Namba Parks and the WINS betting complex (horse racing)… And ultimately, one can’t help but wonder if their business plan relies on impulse buys by people winning big on the ponies; gambling on the gamblers, so to speak. The ultimate proof I can offer to back up my prediction is the parking space I put my car in, the first level of the parking structure, right next to the store elevators, adjacent to ten other open spaces. Now try that at Yodobashi in Umeda.

I was going to ask my bro to do something just like this since he’s going home in a couple weeks: The Great Taco Hunt: A guide to the Los Angeles taco scene
Oh well, I guess he’s gonna have to think up something else to blog (fire hydrants of Orange County, or Surfer Photos from the Pier…)

This is a very, very interesting diagram: Corporate Ownership of Organic Food Companies
Something to think about the next time you go shopping at Earth Foods for organic soybean carab tofutti w/vitamin C-enriched daikon sprout topping.
Corporate ownership of organic food isn’t necessarily bad in my mind, it’s just funny that, say, Crispy Sugar Bombs and Rutabagels have common roots.

Speaking of sheep, get a load of this shit.
What the fuck?
I guess I like my coffee rainbow now. I only wear rainbow t-shirts. The tires on my car are rainbow. The total absence of light is rainbow. And most people from Africa are rainbow.
Political correctness is the second most evil export from America (the first: Britney Spears).

– A Thai who can’t eat spicy food.
– A diabetic Thai.
– A Thai with a peanut allergy.
Any of the conditions listed above will ensure that the unfortunate party will almost never eat food outside their homes. In Thailand, the land of delicious food aplenty, that is just bad luck, and bad karma.

No, not User Interface. Nor Ugly Imperialist. (for the purposes of this post, anyway.)
PERSONAL OBSERVATIONS:
Simply put, “ui!” is the sound of a Thai person in distress. Variations on this include, “uuui!,” “uuii!,” and “uuuuuuui!” (can you see my linguistics major paying off now?)
If I unprovokedly poke my wife in the side, she might exclaim, “uui!” (she might just as soon sock me in the stomach and then demand to know what the hell I’m doing, but I did say “might,” right?) [English equivalent in this example: “Hey!”]
If a Thai dude catches a whiff of (presumedly spicy) gas passed by his friend, he might say “ui!” and pinch his nose in the universal sign for “that’s stanky!” [English equivalent: “Jesus!”]
If a Thai hears something remarkable in a conversation, they might reply with a long “uuuuuii.” [“Ooooh,” or, “uh huh” – just a simple affirmation or acknowledgment of what previus speaker stated, mixed with real or exaggerated amazement or wonder]
The mighty ui is also used for oh shit moments. For instance, if The Sorcerer’s Apprentice had ever been subtitled in Thai, it would have looked something like this:

BACKGROUND
A couple weeks ago, T and I were sitting in a taxi, stuck in that good old Bangkok traffic (for perhaps the 47th time in one week). Conversation turned to the subject of bar fights in Thailand. T has seen many since he is a professional lounge lizard; I have seen only a few, all in Patong Beach. One curious observation we both had is that when a farang (gaijin) gets into an actual fight with a Thai, the place usually explodes with hordes of angry Thais swinging barstools, glass ashtrays, and beer bottles at the foreigner’s head. It’s really quite a trip to watch. They will fuck you up in defense of their Thai brethren, no bullshit on that count, man. Which bring us to the point of this post…
If a foreigner of Asian descent is fighting with, say, a white guy in a Soi Cowboy bar fight, would he be helped out by the Thais? Would Powder be stomped into oblivion by angry bar girls in gogo boots?
THE UI THEORY
In such a situation, if the said Asian starts making loud “uuuuii!” noises when he gets hit, the fury of a thousand Suryothai cannon-bearing elephants will strike down upon the white man. There are at least three possible reasons for this:
1. The Asian man may have been mistaken for a Thai, hence kicking in the Thai Brethren Response
2. Even if he isn’t mistaken as Thai, he may receive enough Asian Sympathy Points to trigger a response
3. Regardless of looks, he may trigger an involuntary response with his tactical use of ui
Regarding that last point, we may need to run some field tests between two white guys to see if what we have coined the Thai Brethren Response is actually just a Pavlovian response to the utterance of ui (and hence must be renamed to the Ui Response).