Category: Web

Hat tip to Osaka Bill (“bill” in the comments, not “Bill”,- that’s Nara Bill) for the link.

You all must have seen these “keyword” spam messages by now, right?:

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disaccharide nearsighted varistor quirk mastermind perseus,
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depressible yesteryear uphold catholic anything censure,
crotchety matisse mongoose caryatid

Some of these spammers are real poets. He gets bonus points for using the words varistor, hyterectomy, and matisse all in the same message.
And now I have this sudden urge to “Get Harder Than Steel” and “Make Her Scream – with 100% EFFECTIVE Generic Vi@gr’a.”
Well, go ahead and sign me up for 50 cases, Mr. Chester Ott.
Do you take checks for international bulk orders?
That is all.

Last week I received an e-mail from Ed Jacobs, the editor at Japanzine stating that this blog had been chosen for a “Best of the Web” award. Japanzine is a free magazine of high quality distributed all over Japan and I have been reading it since its past life as The Alien. Anyway, they have an online version of the zine as well and the “Japan Blogging Scene” article this blog was featured in can be seen at:
http://www.japan-zine.com/0404/Feature1.htm (link updated 4/30/04)
C. Buddha’s Hasty Musings is sandwiched between Antipixel and 35 Degrees, two of my favorite photo blogs (if I can be so forward as to term them such). All I can say is: We’re. Not. Worthy.
Props to Japanzine!
P.S. to Bill: You should stock Japanzine at the bar. They are looking for new distros. I’ll bring the current issue this weekend to show you the ad (read: to brag with).
P.P.S. to Japanzine’s webmaster: Please fix my link! (It’s appearing as a relative URL because there is no protocol prefix.)

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!

How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
Um, as flattering as that is, I think this quiz is kinda sus. Aside from the fact that my English has acquired that unmistakably “Fresh Off the Boat” quality from living overseas for a decade, every single person whose results (I just mistyped that as “resluts”) I’ve seen have been “Grammar God.” I object to this title being passed out like penicillin ampules at a syphilis convention; it’s a stinging insult to my monotheistic way of life (I worship the One True God of Technoeroticism and may you heathens forever burn in Luddite hell).
Finders fee (TBD) goes to Biggie for the quiz.

Posted at Nam’s request:
Show Me, Show You
The albino black sheep site it’s hosted on has a lot of interesting stuff on it, check it out. The site’s claim to fame is the famous google spoof , French military victories and its accompanying list of French military defeats.

You are a sick teddy. You are a very sick teddy.
In fact you are such a sick sick teddy that I’m also becoming sick.
Oh lord, please turn me into a sick sick teddy…

I found this gem in my inbox today. It kind of made my day.

This is my Hangame avatar. Hangame is the site where we play hanafuda
(Go Stop); I described it in this post a few weeks back. Basically, I picked the most insane combination of clothes, accessories, and facial features I could in order to distract opponents when my avatar appears on screen. Not surprisingly, most players I go up against leave the playing table fairly quickly. I used to have a machine gun slung from my avatar’s shoulders, but it was so otaku that nobody would play with me. I had to tone it down.

Props to the Big Ho. His evil plan has worked. I was two clicks away from climax before I found his turd in my cream pie.
In all fairness, I can’t really complain now that my own evil plan has achieved an admirable ranking of its own. Now everbody repeat after me:
Adam Yoshida is an English Teacher living in Japan.
Adam Yoshida is Canadian.
Adam Yoshida is a “pretty princess.”
Also:
Kevin Kim (aka Big Hominid) is the owner of the Anger Poultry House.
Kevin Kim is a slobbering australopithecus with mad drawing skills.
Most importantly, Kevin Kim loves Korean wrestling.

I wrote a haiku today, inspired by this site:
Dusty desert road.
Weary rocket soldier sits,
opening the can.
Obviously, I’ve been playing too much Generals lately. And Adam’s recent post on Spam ignited a firestorm in my gut. I was forced to recognize that I need Spam on a regular basis. Need. But it’s too damn expensive in Japan. It’s as if they still price it the same way they did on the black market after the war, but adjusted for inflation.
Happy Spam thoughts:
Spam is one of the few foods that taste better in the “low salt” version. I tried a can of the spicy-flavored Spam a couple weeks ago and it was nice, but I prefer the low salt Spam sliced into slabs and crispy-fried with eggs, sunny side up, decorated with ketchup and sriracha sauce. Oh, damn, why so I do this to myself at work? I’m HUNGRY.
When I was ten or eleven years old, my friend Kohei came to a profound realization and announced that “Spam” spelled backwards is “maps”. It would be much less embarassing for him if I had forgotten to state that he was twice my age; luckily, I remembered.
UPDATE: It seems my black market comment above may have been unfounded. Apparently we Americans blessed the Japanese with loads of Spam after the war, at least this seems to be the case in some people’s experiences:
http://runker_room.tripod.com/tiestalk/spam.htm
You MUST try a Spam Musubi before you die. Must. A musubi is just a ball of rice. Spam musubi has chunks of pink (former) flesh interspersed in it. I have independently developed a thermonuclear version version of the Spam musubi involving kimchi and mayonnaise, and it is a meal unto itself unless you are drunk. In which case, I sincerely hope you don’t get barfy, because the only grosser thing to spew is a meat pizza (personal Bombay Sapphire memory – friends don’t let friends drink gin neat, even if there is no ice and nothing to mix it with).

If you are a mac buff, go forth:
The Macintosh at 20: Interview with Jef Raskin
And by “mac buff”, I mean a true OG (GFINDER) type playa. Not this new breed of iTards whose solution to everything in life is “Buy a Mac!” Yeah, buy a $2000 mac to surf the net and send e-mail you brainless chatwhores.
“Chatwhores” should be my word for the day, but it’s even below my taking credit for.
Note: This entry was posted by my Powerbook 190 (16-shade greyscale, although the right bottom corner of the lcd has inexplicably become a solid yellow). Which means not a goddamn thing except that I miss System 7. Am I alone in my misery?
By the way, GFINDER worked for me exactly ONE time out of approximately 200,000 tries. It exited the command window to the Finder, and then froze, instead of just freezing at the command window.

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that, “When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.”
However, in government, education, and in corporate America, more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:
1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
4. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride horses.
5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.
7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
9. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase dead horse’s performance.
10. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.
11. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.
12. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
And last but not least, the corporate steadfast:
13. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.