Sacred Society of Osakan Webmasters FAQ

Q: What can you tell me about the Sacred Society of Osakan Webmasters?
A: It’s a secretive and prestigious society that’s very difficult to join.

Q: Can I join?
A: If you are a current or former resident of Osaka and a webmaster, and you can afford the membership fees, yes.

Q: What are the benefits of being a SSOW member?
A: You won’t know all the little joys of being a member until you join, but among other things, you can list it on your resume and website.

Q: Is it true that osakan.com has had the same front page up for nearly a decade?
A: Yes, plans for the site were dreamed up during a legendary tequila session. In fact, the domain was registered via I-mode on an ancient DoCoMo clamshell that very night. The drinking establishment in question is no more, but the dream lives on..

RIP Harry Harrison

The Stainless Steel Rat series is one of my all-time favorites. Also, he inspired me to learn a bit of Esperanto when I was quite young. I did a mail-in course I found advertised at the Huntington Beach public library, and ended up wondering why English supplanted French as the international language, instead of Esperanto. Then again, if shit like this was decided by common sense, we might have been playing on 100 meter football fields for the past 50 years.

YouTube Sanction Appealed

Got this in my inbox this morning:

The YouTube Community has flagged one or more of your videos as inappropriate. Once a video is flagged, it is reviewed by the YouTube Team against our Community Guidelines. Upon review, we have determined that the following video(s) contain content in violation of these guidelines, and have been disabled:
Cockroach Reanimation with Electro-stimulation – (cbuddha)
Your account has received one Community Guidelines warning strike, which will expire in six months. Additional violations may result in the temporary disabling of your ability to post content to YouTube and/or the permanent termination of your account.
For more information on YouTube’s Community Guidelines and how they are enforced, please visit the Help Centre.
Received: 15 Aug 2012 | Acknowledged: 15 Aug 2012 | Appealed

The video, which was up to around 260,000 views, showed me zapping a dead cockroach with a racquet-style bug zapper in order to elicit nerve response. I guess there are some die hard cockroach activists out there.

I have appealed the sanction and am awaiting a response.

Nok Krata (Thai Jungle Quail)

Note: The words “Thai” and “Jungle” were included as descriptors in the title and are probably not part of their real name (which eludes my lazy Googling at this point in time). Rather, I found them for sale at a roadside market stall surrounded by dense Thai jungle in a town called Koi Mek, in Kalasin province, on my way home from Nong Khai a couple months ago.

They were about 60 baht (less than $2) a piece, and the old lady who sold them to me said they were caught that morning. I took the birds and chased Max and Mina around with them, then gave them to our nanny to have her older sister cook at home. The next day, she brought a Thai basil stir fry prepared in my least favorite way – chopped in small pieces, bones and all – which was still mighty tasty if not entirely edible.