This is the first photo I have ever posted to this blog that was not taken with my phone. Merin sent me this one. She spotted it when the girls went shopping after our nice luinch at Chedi Luang. The venue? Namba Parks, of course.
Merin’s phone is equipped with a camera that treads with muddy boots all over my once very modern Hitachi phone. The time for an upgrade has come. I can smell it in the air. Next month, I think. My incentive for waiting, of course, is the spring lineup from AU that will surely feature a model that can keep me happy for another long, long year.
Hell, in another year cellphones will eliminate a few more product categories if all follows the inevitable path to consolidation. I predict that cellphones will be marketed to replace IC recorders, lightweight mpeg video cameras, and universal remotes. The technology is already most of the way there and the manufacturers are definitely weighing customer demand for these features against higher price.
Daikon Flowers
Chedi Luang is a new Thai restaurant in Kita Horie that we visited (We: Me, Bill, Nam, Merin, and Nam’s kohai Dao) on the weekend. Good food and interesting presentation. We ate more than our fill of curries, fish/meat dishes, and more exotic fare. It broke down to about 2,500 yen per person ordering a la carte, which I declare a damn good deal for Japan. The girl who runs it danced with Nam at the event in Mihara a couple weeks ago. She also works part time as a masseuse (masseusesse?) and I have no idea why I am writing about that.
Go. Eat. Make like a Thai and be happy!
To the what?
Another brain teaser at Namba Parks. The place just gets more and more intriguing as I explore deeper with each visit, and it’s turning out to be a virtual goldmine for Engrish on signs and whatnot.
Incensed
Sample products strewn around Taro’s van.
Random Yoshida Links
The links that can be found by ego-Googling are sometimes surprising. I hunted down the site of another Justin Yoshida last month! I left a message in his guestbook, but haven’t gotten word back yet. What do you know? He plays CS, just like me. Heh.
This guy must actually be me, from an alternate universe or something. Maybe the metaphysic membrane between our realities was temporarily ripped and he somehow fell through. It should be interesting if we hook up sometime – he apparently lives in Hawaii so it’s conceivable I might make the effort someday. If he’s not hiding from me, that is. I can be weird sometimes, maybe he thinks I’m a maniac or something. Come to think of it, the thought of another Justin Yoshida is kind of scary. What if he goes aggro and kills a bunch of people or something? It might reflect poorly on me, you know. Twenty years from now when I’m introducing myself to people they might say, “Yoshida… Aren’t you the guy who blew up a tour bus full of Chinese tourists and sold their remains as humuhumunukunukuapuaa pudding at Hanauma Bay?”
Wow. Got lost in dreamland there for a second. Anyway. ego-Googling results. Right. Dozo:
Yoshida Records
Some featured artists: ADELE LIPUMA, SIW MALMKVIST, ZZAJ (this last one is a springoff of ZWAN, I suspect)
Yoshida Auto
These native Osakans will ship cars to Ireland, Mauritus, and Chile for you.
Nami Yoshida, Illustrator
Her first picture book is on sale.
Mac Adept
The manager for the packaging design department came to me with a blank procurement form last year and said, “Fill these out. We need a new Mac; you have 1,000,000 yen to spend on it.” My mind was instantly filled with images of a dual processor G5, Apple Cinema display, striped and mirrored SCSI backup system, Firewire-powered cappuccino maker, etc., you know, The Perfect System. I almost cried. (I say “almost” because this would have been a dream in my Mac maven phase, say five or six years ago.)
Well, I came even closer to crying today when I saw how this new girl, the Designated Mac Operator in the design room was using the Perfect System. She had the 23″ Apple Cinema HD Display (max. resolution 1,920 x 1,200) at the lowest resolution possible, 800 x 500 while laying out pages in PageMaker. I couldn’t believe my eyes even though I watched her 1337 operating skillz for a good 5 minutes over her shoulder. The only possible analogy I can come up with would be sitting two feet from a movie screen; as in TOO CLOSE to a good thing. My man, the folders on the desktop (to mix metaphors) were the size of matchbooks. I later found out that she lowers the resolution instead of using zoom tools in the DTP programs. Amazing.
Ouch.
If you’re gonna do it, do it right:
Big delays as bullet trains hit same man
The headline is misleading because it wasn’t just bullet trains (going in opposite directions no less), homebiscuit managed to get hit by THREE trains. Damn!
Got Rice
Nissan Laurel in my company’s parking lot with a homemade rear wing. I could see the bolts holding it on the trunk. As a side note, the Nissan Laurel was popular in its heyday because it was relatively cheap sedan/coupe but it sported the same 6-cylinder engine as the Skyline. A lot of punk-ass motherfuckers and wannabe yaks still ride around in this car.
Salaryman Wept
Found an article from last month that hit close to home:
Competition stiffens to work oneself to death
Let Salaryman tell you something about dedication: Too much can kill, and blind dedication is either for the young, or for well-paid upper management. Even in these two cases, there is only so much you can accomplish before you break down.
With that in mind, keep it real and work your ass off. By playing your cards right, your investment of time and life energy will eventually be returned in the form of work experience and maybe a nice watch (standard-issue salaryman bling-bling).
Ulcers. Yes, it seems everybody has them around here. Like everyone else, I have a horror story. Two years ago, my senior partner on a prototyping project sat up quite suddenly in his seat and handed me a stack of documents. His eyes were bulging as he bent over and proceeded to noisily vomit blood into the wastebasket. Then he slumped over in his chair and the girls in the room started screaming. When the departmental manager left the room to find the nurse on call, homeboy opened his eyes, pointed to the aforementioned stack of papers, and said “tanomu wa” (Get it done.).
Now, this guy is a legend. He is the most dedicatedist motherfucker I have ever met, and a pain in the ass to work for because of his scrupulousness – he put the “ei” in “einaru”, if you know what I mean. And he ended up spewing entrail juice. Coincidence? Hardly. So that is the moral of this story – the most dedicated person in the office always ends up vomiting blood.
The End
Of Lohms and Mindslaves
Lying on my desk is a document entitled:
Lohms vs. Orifice Size
I don’t know who put it there, but apparently I get to make a presentation on it later this morning. in Japanese! Yay!
Welcome to the modern state of technical translation, where a total ignoramus like myself can hop on the Al Gore Expressway and become an expert on any specialized subject matter in a matter of seconds – and before you ask, no, a Lohm is not a penis (but an orifice is, well, an orifice). A Lohm is a Liquid ohm – get it? Ohms are units used to express electrical resistance, so morphazenilinguistically speaking, Lohms are the units used for liquid resistance. This unit of measure, when pronounced by my Japanese colleagues, sounds like “Rohm”, which is an electronics component maker based in Kyoto. (Sorry if you thought I was going to continue in the vein of fluid dynamics; the best I can do for you there is to promise a future update about writing my name in the snow.)
I wrote a slogan for Rohm’s public relations department when I first started my career as a non-gaijin-looking gaijin in a translation company years ago. It didn’t seem like a special job or anything, they just needed a catch line for a “small advertising effort” in English and they faxed over some sentences in Japanese to base it on (BTW they had a G4 fax machine that seemed super fast compared to standard G3 fax machines but often suffered from mysterious transmission failures.). I ended up creating three or four different variations for them to choose between and thought little of what would become of it thereafter. Turns out they ended up using it in their radio and television commercials, which were aired quite frequently on national television. It was also used on company brochures, posters, etc., and somewhat less gloriously, on the back covers of obscure trade magazines with names like “Precision Mounted Chip Design” and “Capacitors Weekly.” I admit, I was proud whenever I saw my words out in the real world. (I feel free to talk about it now because they are no longer using it on their website and the posters in the subway stations are long gone. Also, regardless of what I post below, I think it was a great ad campaign and hope it was a success for Rohm.) In a way, I felt silly on the importance being placed on a simple phrase I thought up at the spur of the moment. Then again, simplicity is often the best option, and it was gratifying to see my words in print and pixel broadcast to millions. Millions and millions of potential clients who might make a decision based on seeds planted in their heads by effective advertising. And if it sounds like it started getting to my head, that’s because it did at the peak of the ad campaign.
Sometimes the commercials would come on when I was watching TV with other people (sometimes clients) and it was a turbo-nitro ego boost when the leggy models in the ads paraded around futuristic space-and-satellite backdrops with my words flowing out of their mouths. People I was with would usually give me props and I would just bask in the glory as everyone came to the realization that, in a way, these girls were actually my mindslaves. Through the looking glass of manga/Kubrickian reality where my reasoning takes vacations after steady consumption of alcohol, the mindslaves on the screen seemed completely powerless to resist. They returned to the screen at regular intervals to convey my thoughts. They awaited further orders. They waited for anything, some kind of sign or command. There they remain to this day. Faithfully waiting.
Wanting!
Needing!
OK, so maybe it got to my head a little bit more than I care to admit, but it was still kinda cool for a salaryman who was just starting out and trying to make his mark on the world. Especially when the cute models were replaced by a fly. Not just any fly. The Fly. According to this Japanese fan site, Rohm chose Jeff Goldblum because his role as a scientist in the movie Jurassic Park (released in Japan shortly after the commercials started airing) perfectly fit the image of the company’s high tech products (and also because he was new to Japandering). As a famous actor later to be known for 13375ki11s with a Powerbook, and used to dealing with the mind games and manipulation that is show biz, would he be impervious to my powers? Heh.
Wanting!
Needing!