Category: Society & Culture

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).

(thx fish)

Oh my god, Jack Bauer is my hero.

So after 9/11, I signed up for e-mail updates from CNN for breaking news items – you know, back then it was impossible to get to major news sites and even the big newsbloggers were getting bogged down with traffic. I figured it was a good way to be kept kinda in the loop for major events, etc… It worked out kind of in that way, in that sometimes the e-mails would cover stories that we just don’t get coverage of in Japan, even on CNN International.
The thing is, though, it sometimes makes me sad. Like today, the CNN Breaking News alert I received contained the following info only:

The Pittsburgh Steelers win Super Bowl XL, beating the Seattle Seahawks 21-10 Sunday night.

I may just be completely out of the loop, but hearing that just makes me want to say whoop-dee-fucking-do. Mind you, these News Alerts are not daily or anything, they only send them when “important” shit happens. So I guess Superbowl results now rate right up there with devastation of entire cities and American soldiers fighting and dying in foreign lands (actually, they stopped sending updates about the war over a year ago).
I guess what I’m trying to say is: Priorities, bitches. In the grander scheme of things, individual sports competition results rank very low. Plus, anyone who didn’t already know the score by the time you sent the News Alert probably doesn’t give half a shit.
It is Monday, and I have had my rant.
///
It occurs to me that I could be told to simply opt out of the mailings. Believe me, I have tried…

Look, I understand both sides of the issue fairly well – on this issue there isn’t much middle ground to speak of – and I agree that Japan should at least abide by the treaties it has already signed.
HOWEVER, claiming that the Japanese are hunting whales to extinction is just as dishonest.
I’m just saying.