So I didn’t even know about the Two Ronnies until today. They apparently had a show on BBC from 1971. In Japan, Beat Takeshi and Beat Kiyoshi formed their manzai act, Two Beat (aka Two Beats) shortly after that and first appeared on NHK in 1976.
Coincidence?
Or did Takeshi borrow the naming scheme from the Ronnies?
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BTW, the naming is pretty much the only thing these two duos have in common:
Category: Web
Yoshi Ikuzo – Precursor to Japanese Hip-hop (yo yo)
He’s kind of the Grandmaster Flash of Japan, except he didn’t contribute anything to turntablism and he raps in the Tohoku (instead of Bronx) vernacular. Also, he includes kamishibai (link) in his lyrics, which I’m pretty sure Grandmaster Flash did not. He sure does have a Furious Five, though. Or maybe Fifteen..
Torrent alternative
Download your torrents via http: furk
I tried it. It was free and it worked as advertised. It probably isn’t an RIAA honeypot; they ain’t that smart.
Nikkeis from South America paid to leave Japan (and not come back to work ever again)
I’ve really been out of the loop, but this was a really interesting read: Japan Pays Foreign Workers to Go Home
Even though the dumbass running the program can’t keep his racist views in check, I basically can’t see how having this choice is a completely bad thing. Sure, it’s insulting if you want to think of it like that, but hell – I know a lot of people who have needed to beg, borrow, or steal money to buy a ticket home when everything went wrong. And pride is a luxury for practical people.
PETARDED
PETA doesn’t like fishmongers tossing fish at the Pike Place Fish Market
PETA wishes Obama hadn’t swatted a fly on live TV
PETA needs to hurry up and merge with the Church of Scientology so we all have a single entity to hate and ridicule.
Animals are delicious, biotches.
Learning to speak Thai
Andrew Biggs (I always think of him as the Dave Spector of Thailand although that’s far from being accurate) wrote a couple of great columns over at the Bangkok Times:
RAMKHAMHAENG SECRETS (PART ONE)
The first farang student at the world’s largest semi-open university discovers the intricacies of trying to master the Thai language
RAMKHAMHAENG SECRETS (PART TWO)
more.
Sarcasm Tag
Look, I found a non-marketing twit written in the last two months!
Sky Cries Murder
“The rock legend Jimi Hendrix was murdered by his manager, who stood to collect millions of dollars on the star’s life insurance policy, a former roadie has claimed in a new book.”
LINK
Somebody here is gonna have some serious karma issues: Is it the roadie or the manager?
The Story of Sriracha
Sriracha sauce that is: A Chili Sauce to Crow About
My parents had a bottle of Sriracha on the table ever since I was about ten, so I literally grew up with it. Last year when a university van drove us back home from Pattaya through the actual town of Sriracha, I was all jazzed about buying local sauces there, but that wasn’t their specialty – their specialty was marble mortar and pestles, and we did buy a good set of those.
The equivalent chili sauces in Thailand are horridly sweet except for a few brands, which are decent but not nearly as good as Sriracha. When you go to a noodle stand in Thailand, you are presented with a plethora of flavorings to add, such as fish sauce, dried chili, wet chili paste, Sriracha-like sauce, vinegar (or vinegar-infused chili), sugar, ground peanuts, thai lime, etc., so it’s not such a huge deal for noodles, but Sriracha is sorely missed for other foods. You end up substituting things like prik-nampla-manao (literally, chili-fishsauce-lime), but just end up wishing SE Asians would just realize how damn good Sriracha is and just import it by the boatload from the US of A. Kind of like a reverse (culinary) FOB type thing I guess.
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All I can say is – Sriracha should have “Tran 84” on the bottles.
Wolfram|Alpha is racist (wherein I channel Angry Asian Man)
Check out Gizmodo’s post: Wolfram Alpha: A Bit Racist?
Searching for the word “dumb” brings up “results for Racist synonym trees that associated the word dumb with black.”
W|A explained this essentially as follows:
“One thing Wolfram|Alpha gives is synonyms for dumb. An example is “dim”.
…So, “dim” is a synonym of “dumb”. But what are synonyms of “dim”?”
What this doesn’t explain, in my mind, is the results and synonym trees for the “N word.”
Better yet, contrast that with the the synonym tree for “honky”:
Now can someone please lexicographically explain the fuck out of that shit?