June Change

Hey!
It's June. Offically the start of rainy season here in Japan. Which means most of my work days will be humid, dark and rainy, my laundry will take two weeks to dry on my balcony and my holidays will always be filled with thunderstorms. What does one do during such a wonderous time of year? Eat, drink and be merry! It's a good think I have Pizza Hut on speed dial.
On a sidenote, I'm interested in any suggestions you readers might have for making the site more interesting. I've been trying to entertain one suggestion by adding more Japan specific information, and don't worry Bushkie, there is a big shoe story on the way.

Wisdom of the Day: Call your Bushkie!

Tease

After seeing a certain girl in action, but whose name I won’t say, I figured I’d write this post as a shout out to a few of my friends. This girl, who we will name Yukiko for this post, is a major Japanese style tease. She’s quite attractive, she looks like she’s about 22 but in reality she’s over 30. She dresses well, she’s cute and fun and has a high pitched voice, which probably is very amusing during sex and she has a boyfriend which she seems not to be interested in at all. This is the typical Japanese tease. Yukiko is looking for a husband. She’s at the age where Japanese society tells her to get married and start popping out kids. Now she has no intention of sleeping with us foreigners, but she seems to get a distinct pleasure from teasing the shit out of us especially a friend of mine who will also remain unnamed, so we will call him Sal.

Sal’s story is unimportant, but he’s highly interested in Yukiko and she seems keen on him. They have hung out a number of times and yet she keeps him close enough to remain interested and waste his time yet far enough that he won’t score. Normally one would say to continue and see what happens while not getting your hopes up as to not thoroughly stress out when it ends in a weird and disappointing way (as I’m sure it will).

But now Yukiko is becoming very friendly with a number of other teachers and is teasing in a similar way, including yours truly. Her current method of teasing comes from her shopping. While bikini shopping for the summer season, Yukiko took a number of cell phone pictures of her in various bikinis to get opinions to help her decide what to buy, even though she bought one before showing the pictures to anyone. Now she’s showing them to a large number of guys at school, even the rather large and unattractive ones who claim she has been drinking with them as well.

This all boils down to the fact that Yukiko is a hog for gaijin attention. She is to be avoided at all costs. I hope you read and understand this well Sal. That girl in Kobe is calling for you now, go and see her.

Wisdom of the Day: The last drop always goes the farthest

Waiting

Unlike every other country in the world, we do not have Star Wars! That’s right every other country in the world, and probably even Iraq, is currently enjoying Star Wars, yet we here in “technologically advanced� Japan, have to wait. You can only watch the trailer so many times, look at pictures online, read non-spoiling reviews and get taunting emails from your friends (thanks Keith!) until you start to go crazy. So late last night, on the advice of one of my oldest friends and one of the biggest Star Wars fans I know, I downloaded a screener copy of Episode III. At the moment it’s just sitting on my hard drive waiting to be watched, and I have skipped through a little bit just to check the quality, which is good. Normally I would never watch a movie I have been waiting for, for a while, in this format, but drastic times call for drastic measures.

But the real idea behind this post is the reasoning behind the late release date in Japan. To date, I have heard two promising theories. The first is that because of the smaller size of the Japanese cinema market and the cost of a ticket (Â¥1800 yen - nearly 18 bucks!!!) big name movies are usually released within three to four weeks of each other. This kinda makes no sense as in June we will see the release of Batman Begins, War of the Worlds, Hostage, Elektra and Ring 2. All these will be released in about two weeks of Star Wars, which launches on July 9^th.

The second theory deals with the timing of the famous Japanese summer time bonus. The average Japanese salaryman gets an annual summertime bonus equal to about 1.5x-2.0x his monthly salary. I thought this happens in early August, but apparently many company do it in July as well. Timing the release of Star Wars with the summertime bonus allows Takeshi-Q-public to buy all sorts of Star Wars crap. If you though movie merchandising was big in the states you should see all the manner of stupid crap they sell here: books, keychains, dangly things for your cell phone, stickers, toys, five sizes of posters, etc.

According to the news, Star Wars has been released in the army bases here in Japan and at the Expo 2005 in Aichi. Damn that copy is burning holes in my hard drive. I might have to clear my schedule for the evening. Also for any MPAA official who is reading this, I still fully intend in pay my 18 dollars and watch Revenge of the Sith in the movie theater like all the other good Japanese.

Wisdom of the Day: Good things come to those who wait

Lost & Found

Amazing! I found my lost workout gloves. Now for those who know me pretty well I used to be a fat bastard. Before I came to Japan I was pushing 270 lbs. (about 125 kg.) but thanks to a semi-decent diet and a regular exercise routine, I’ve been about to drop down to around 204 lbs. (approximately 93.6 kg.) and maintain my weight.
About two weeks ago I lost my somewhat old and jagged workout gloves. I’d been planning on getting a new pair anyway, but I’m busy and a little lazy so I was kinda hopping those would last me until I get my lazy ass to Spotaka. Anyway, about a week after the intial losing, I found one of the gloves in a locker (number 95) which I regularly use. I was shocked to still find it there, leading me to believe they do absolutely no maintain nor cleaning at the gym, yet they have the gall to close the gym on Thursday for “Maintenance!�
Well, today I found the second glove, in the back of another locker I use when I need to hang my clothes up (number 92). Reunited and it feels great. Now I’m really gonna complain to that asshole manager that runs the gym. Last time when I told him they need more treadmills, because they are always packed while the rest of the gym is empty, he told me they are only filled when I go. Motherfucker, that’s how you lose a customer, bitch.

Wisdom of the Day: The customer is higher than God

Crowded

Many of you have heard the stories of the crowded trains and the pushers in Tokyo whose job it is to literally push the people into the trains and subways during rush hour, and many other times. Osaka, being only slightly less crowded than Tokyo with fewer packed train lines, has never really needed any of these people.

But my experience on the Midosuji line today taught me different. I was able to take a few snapshots of the Midosuji line at 9:30PM at night, not exactly a time I would expect to see a train with it’s cars overflowing onto the platform. I also tried to grab a good shot of the crowded train leaving the station, but it’s only a 1.3 MegaPixel Phone. Akiko said that it’s bad to take pictures like this, but what does she know? On the plus side she looks great in a bikini!

Wisdom of the Day: Wait for the next train

Old Shows

Cruising through one of the few remaining Bit Torrent sites the other day, Torrentspy, I found the complete set of one of my favorite all animated shows: ReBoot. ReBoot was probably the first fully computer animated shows to make it on to network television back when I was in High School. It’s the story of fictional characters who live inside the computer. They speak English but with the occasional computer reference, no one dies, for example, they go offline or are deleted, no one has a job, they have a format, etc. It’s a fun show with action and a fun story line and lots of comedy highly recommended.

Anyway, I what I was saying is that thanks to DVD, P2P programs and TiVo, these shows will never leave our collective consciousness. Just think of all the old shows you used to watch that are no longer on. A few of my favorites: the original Battlestar Galactica (although the new one kicks ass too), ReBoot, the Dukes of Hazzard (the movie looks great), Star Trek: Deep Space 9, Babylon 5, Seinfeld, Transformers, and many more. More series are being released everyday; recently I saw an advertisement for the A-Team DVD set, here in Japan. I didn’t think anyone here even knew about that show.

So what’s your favorite TV show of all time? Let’s see some answers in the comment section!

Wisdom of the Day: You can take the girl out of Brooklyn, but you can’t take the bullshit out of the girl

12 Days After

Well, here I am nearly two weeks after my buzz cut and my hair is growing in. I would mainly like a completely brown head and then I go back to the way it was in my older pictures. I have recently taken a few pictures with some people and I am a little scared at the way they look, I still am rather bald. But whatcha gonna do right?

In the meantime I’ve had a bit of a cold running and I think it has something to do with the fact that I have only a little hair on my head and I’ve stopped wearing my Tiger Woods golf cap because it was making me break out on my forehead. I’d rather have a slightly shaven head without acne than vice-versa, that was high school.

In other news, some of my regular readers (are there three of them?) will notice that my personally designed webblog site is not accessible. Needless to say I haven’t gotten that lazy, I’m in the process of a major site redesign and I’ve found that it’s easier to update on blogspot.com and I’ve started edited the template file, so expect the Trailer of the Month as well as Picture of the Month to resurface on there. I already have picked the trailer for June. I’ve also added a few links to my E³ review, so check it out.

Wisdom of the Day: You’re not supposed to wear white after Labor Day.

It's Over!

The Electronics Entertainment Expo 2005 has ended after three great days in Las Vegas. The show gave us pictures of games I was waiting to see and information that wasn’t all that exciting. The PS3 looks great but the press conference was so boring. At least they showed some demos that slightly resembled games but I imagine the final products will look completely different. The biggest draw seemed to be the Spider Man/Gran Turismo realtime render orgy mixing game racing, the spider-man CG model from the movie and some real acting footage of Tobey Maguire saving some children, but it didn’t really impress me. I’m sick of hearing talk, show us the games!

Nintendo had quite a showing with the Nintendo Revolution and the latest incarnation of Zelda: The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess which I am buying on launch day and staying in the house for 4 days to finish. Sorry friends…

Microsoft was the worst of the bunch in my opinion for a couple of reasons. Like I said earlier the Xbox basically blew, with the exception of a few games. The Xbox360 seems to be doing the same thing, simply taking the most powerful PC hardware on the market and cramming it into a decidated game machine. Which also means the majority of Xbox360 games will be available on the PC within a few months in a higher resolution. And yes, I’ll buy one for Halo 3, which was a no show at the game show, but that the ever arrogant Bill Gates claims will destroy the PS3 when they are released simultaneously. Too bad Bungie was bought by those fuckers.

Anyway, here’s the rest of my recommendations from the show, happy clicking.

PS2:
Kingdom Hearts II

Final Fantasy XII

Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence

Soul Calibur III

Castlevania: Curse of Darkness

PS3:
Metal Gear Solid 4

FFVII Tech Demo

Dark Sector

Sony Press Conference

Nintendo:
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

Nintendo Conference

Xbox360:
Perfect Dark Zero

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Gears of War

Wisdom of the Day: You can never go home again, but you can always go back to IHOP

Bread & More

Today I went to my student Miki’s bread party and it was great. Now I know what you are saying, bread party? And yes it sound a little strange until you realize the wide variety of breads, pastries, cakes, cookies, cream filled things and flour based things you will find in a typical Japanese bakery. Miki runs a small bread factory which makes bread for restaurants in the Shinsaibashi/Minami area. Anyway, the party was filled with pizza, sandwiches, cakes, bread roles, muffins, too much food. I think I’ll be full for the next week. Did I mention there were some very nice cute girls there? No? Okay, I’m mentioning it now! Just click for the pics as usual.

I also had yet another interesting encounter with a girl, which I cannot make heads or tails of. I think when you first meet a girl they are afraid of what you might do and if you do it what you will do after. Yet if you do that then they like you more, if you don’t do that they are not as interested as if you did do what they didn’t want you do. Sorry, I’d rather not be more specific for our female audience, but suffice it to say that I confused. How about you?

Oh, I almost forgot! Happy Birthday Miho! Thanks for the invite!

Wisdom of the Day: Do what they don’t want you to do.

Stupid Gaijin...

On Tuesday night, right after updating this blog I found a strange occurrence, my internet connection had gone offline. Some of you know that I have a wireless network in my house and if you know about network routers they will continually establish the any PPPoE connection you have, in this case my VDSL service, but for some reason the router was reporting that my connection had failed. This is a semi-common occurrence in the world of cable internet, which is usually rectified by resetting the modem. So I unplugged my modem and went to sleep, did I mention it was nearly three in the morning?

The next evening I returned home to find the same occurrence. That’s odd, I thought. I plugged the DSL modem (the NTT salesman swears its optical fiber and technically not DSL, but why is it called VDSL?) directly to my system and still no dice. The system reported that my username and password where invalid.

After much search through the important internet service related papers, which are in a big pile on my kitchen table, I finally found the number for NTT. I called and spoke my awful Japanese to find out that I’m not supposed to call them for service help, but rather my provider Biglobe. After 30 minutes on hold I got an operator who didn’t speak any English. Now I know what you are thinking, only an American, or some British blokes, would think that everyone will speak English since he/she is too lazy to learn that country’s native language. I speak much better Japanese now than I did three years ago, but still not good enough for certain situations, like this. Nevertheless I could get nowhere on the phone and fighting the web site was getting monotus (there’s a law in Japan that no website written on Japanese soil can be easy to navigate or use, in any language). Finally, thanks to the help of two very nice guys (thanks Justin and Luke!) I’m now back online and Biglobe has my credit card number.

The moral of the story is three-fold. One: read your mail! The letter saying they would shut off my service if I didn’t give them a payment option was sitting on my table. I had just forgotten to have it translated. Two: Learn the fucking language of the country you are fucking living in! Three: Stay with cable internet. One company, one provider, one bill, zero hassle, zero stress and the support staff sounds cuter. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to study some kanji.

Wisdom of the Day: All salesmen are full of shit.

What Do Women Want?

Can you answer this question if you're not a woman? I think not. Recently, in my life and the life of those around me, the difficulty arising in understanding women and what they want has become increasingly difficult. Scientists think this is attributed to a rise in the female indecision hormone caused the onset of spring and oncoming of a summer where they will wear all manner of light and/or skimpy clothes thus drawing the eyes of every man they walk by. This, to me, does not seem to say why women can be so hard to understand.

I would like to explain at least 10 recent situations in which myself and my friends have found understanding women to be complicated, but these are things I promised I would not talk about, therefore I have no example to help you understand my mind in this post. Did I just type understand my mind? I've been here too long!


Wisdom of the Day: If you don't understand it, it can't hurt you.

Loss of Games

Well today is the beginning of the E³ in Las Vegas. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the E³, it stands for Electronics Entertainment Expo, or the place where all the newest games, systems and accessories for the gaming industry are shown. This event has become so massive and popular that now many new games and systems are announced officially here before they make the news in Japan, let alone an official unveiling.

Anyway, undoubted the biggest news is the new level in the so-called console wars. This year and next will be no exception in console history. First up we have the Playstation 3, the successor to the ultra popular PS2, which I bought on the first day- never do that!, which will undoubted sell tons here in Japan but will probably have to content with the launch of Halo 3 for Microsoft's new Xbox 360. Microsoft is a whole lot of talk as usual, they talked a lot about the original Xbox, but any serious gamer will tell you that the only games really worth having were Halo 1 & 2 and Star Wars: KOTOR and KOTOR 2. Therefore I say Microsoft and all their game people are full of shit! To round off the list is Nintendo, my old flame, showing off sketchy details about their newest system, at the moment called Revolution. At least they have a new and awesome looking Zelda coming out this Christmas.

But I'm getting away from the point. Over the past five years I've noticed a startling trend in my gaming life. Something that I never thought would happen to me has happened, I've lost a great deal of free time to work and socializing and now I never have any time for games, with the rare occasion for some late night PSP in my bed or on the train. What has happened to me? It seems like everyone else in America has acquired more time to play, and here I am, an old-school but hardcore, nonetheless, gamer without anytime to play! I'm getting excited about Super Nintendo emulators for my PSP, while the sleek and sexy PS3 is getting ready to land at my door, if I just had 27 hours free to play it a week! Any thoughts would be helpful!

BTW: I'll have my favorites of the E³ up at the end of the show!

Wisdom of the Day: Beauty is just a light-switch away.

The Aftermath

Approximately 12 hours, 51 minutes and 47.2 seconds ago, the third and final in the Nick Party Series, Nick's Spring Party '05 ended, leaving drama, drunkenness, debauchery, daiquiris and delight in its wake.

The party started as usual, except with a wide variety of new faces making an appearance. Large amounts of food were served, including Oreo cookies, 100yen store brand pasta with the now-famous MAMA meat sauce, all manner of frozen chicken, a variety of breads courtesy of Miki pan, Ritz crackers, and much more. The party continued to build steam and people enjoyed themselves until the drama began.

First the bitch who lives next door called the building owners (a lovely older couple whom I am on excellent terms with and who live on the top floor of the building) instead of calling the police because she has no life and needs something to bitch about. Also she should learn how to control her fucking children because they make more noise on a regular basis than all three of my parties put together. She was also quite rude when I tried to apologize, which I nearly substited for a New York apology. Anyway I apologized to the owners, who were very nice to me, and I plan to issue a formal Japanese style apology tomorrow when their office opens.

Next a few people who were in the party leaned against a wooden divider door, usually used to separate rooms in a normal Japanese apartment but was hidden in the corner to make the room seem more open, and forced it to fall door on some poor girl's head. The bigger problem being that her head broke the small window in the door and sent glass flying all over. I was very impressed with the actions of my Japanese manager Baba-san, who took control of the situation smoothly and sorted everything out. Baba-san is also know for his strong resistance to the control of himself during periods of intense alcohol consumption.

Then after two crises, I had to deal with the noise management, FAC (floor alcohol content), bathroom poster signing (they always forget!), wrestling, smoking, bungee jumping off the balcony, samba dancing, a Vanilla Ice CD (where did that come from?) and a few rusty trombones.

Karim was nice enough to photograph the guests and various drinking spectacles so I'll have those pictures up in a few days when I get them. Until then I'm left with a dirty apartment and the stench of old beer. Okay, well now it's clean.

Wisdom of the Day: more people = more noise

Adventures in Haircuts

Okay, we definitely have a problem. Yesterday, after attempting to grow my hair out for over three months, I decided to finally get a haircut, being unhappy with the way my hair was looking and the amount of time and gel it was consuming. My usual haircut is very simple: shave the sides and back, trim the top, keep it all short enough to get out of the shower and go, but still have a little more on top then around my head. But since I had so much hair I figured this time I would take a No.2 set of clippers and have the whole hair buzzed to very short so that I could style it as I wanted later.

Now I'm not stupid enough to attempt this sort of trim myself and I have no issues whatsoever with paying the barber fourteen bucks to cut it. I entered the barbershop and told him, in my best Japanese which apparently isn't very good, what I wanted. He must've asked me if I was certain about 20 times, which is a common occurrence in Japan so I didn't think anything of it. It was only after I had no hair left that I realized my error. I had told him a number much shorter, thanks to the good translation and hairstyling advice of my friend Carl, than he expected and he wasn't sure that was what I wanted, hence the questions.

Well, now I'm kinda bald. I have included some bad pictures for all to see, but I reckon within about 10 days my head will be dark again, and within two weeks I will no longer feel cool breezes on my scalp. Now I know how you feel Chris!

Wisdom of the Day: Study the language of the country you intend to live in for a while.

Check out the World of Jedicraft website

Meanings

Okay, so yesterday I was chatting with my friend Keith online and he brought up a very good point after reading my post from Monday. I said that because of my busy schedule it was very difficult for me to post on a regular basis. But I feel a little intimidated because many of the other blogs update multiple times a day. Quite frankly, I feel I'm not that interesting to post that much and am attempting to at least make 4 times a week. This posts usually revolve around my interesting life, people I meet, things I see, or anything that happens to pop in my mind.

I'm getting away from the topic, anyway he responded to my post my saying that the reason that most bloggers post so often and say so much is because they do nothing else but sit in front of their computers and blog all day long. I intend to agree. A quick run around the webring of blogs on blogspot (where this blog is mirrored) showed that something like 85% are just saying whatever comes into their minds when they post. Therefore how do I separate myself from this crowd? At the moment I can't and I am with them. But I have plans for this site and have always intended to use this space to keep my friends updated on my life in Japan. Unfortunately I only started it three years after I came to Japan!

Anyway, more updates are coming along with cool Javascript stuff and maybe some Flash animation if I can get my lazy ass in gear to learn it. Until then toss me a mail and tell me what you think of my ramblings.

Wisdom of the Day: The bigger they are, the harder they hit.

Japanese Space Battles

For all of you in North America and well most of the rest of the world, May 19^th is international released of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Unfortunately for us in Japan, the newest in the saga won't be released until early July. Now I told myself that I won't read any reviews, nor would I read any emails from my friends about, but thanks to my involuntary source (thanks Tony, and you said you'd bake us a cake!), yet with days till the premier I find myself scouring the web for any and all information!

Take for example this showing of former Mets outfielder and now of the Nipponham Sapporo Fighters, Shinjo Tsuyoshi, dressed like Darth Vader for the opening of Sunday's game against ummmm.. someone, sorry I couldn’t find out. Japan is simply Star Wars crazy, therefore what is one gaijin like myself to do until the release date? Well, here is my advice for all you depressed Star Wars addicts.

• Run, don't walk to your local Tsutaya and rent the DVD for at least a week
• Print out as many articles you can about the new star wars movie and use them as bases for your lessons plans for the next few months
• Go home and just off your samurai costume from Halloween and get some green paint for that fake katana you bought in Kyoto
• Bring in both the original and special edition Star Wars tapes and have the voice room students decide which is better
• Always remember that creature names do count as new vocabulary words and are legal in certain Scrabble groups
• Go out and get drunk. Hopefully alcohol and the beautiful women of Japan will help you get over your issues

I don't know if I can make it. Just please don't spoil the ending for me!

Wisdom of the Day: Eventually, you will have to turn the car around.

Difficulties

Life is tough and busy. Earlier I was reading a blog based in Japan by a girl named Mari which I find to be funny and entertaining. But I realized that with my busy schedule it is nearly impossible to blog as much as her and to be as interesting. Attest to today's schedule:

• wake up at 9AM, eat breakfast, do push-ups
• leave house at 10:30AM go to bank and post office, where long line is sure to be waiting for me
• meet private student at 12:00PM in Honmachi for an one hour lesson
• go to the gym at 1:30PM until around 3:30PM
• go home and change, catch train at 4:30PM for special out-service work in Nara
• return home after 11:00PM and watch the end of Season 3 of 24, sorry I'm addicted, but did I mention how good it is? Even Rush loves it!
  

As you can see this is sometimes a normal day, so the time for blogging eludes me. I forgot to mention that I will be getting up at 7:00AM tomorrow to go work with the high school girls. But they are oh so cute!

Wisdom of the Day: Don't judge a book by it's bad hair.

Mother's Day

Today is Mother's Day in Japan and America. Thanks to 1800flowers.com I'm saved. I don't mean this to sound like an advertisement for that company and in many ways I feel Mother's Day, like many other national holidays, has become more about making money for large corporations rather than about appreciating your mother. Still I wanted to make sure my mother knew I was thinking about her, all the way from the other side of the Pacific. Actually the two most important people in my life are my mother and grandmother, both of whom raised me and I can say that a great portion of my personality comes from them. And they are the best cooks in Brooklyn, Don't ask me to say who is better, because I'm not getting into that. Let's just say they both have their own specialities, including grandma's meatballs, which only get made on special occasions these days.

Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you to Mom and Grandma for everything you've done for me. There isn't enough space on the web to write all the things, but I just hope I have made you proud and grown into the man you hoped I would be.

Wisdom of the Day: Call your mother!!

Random Thoughts

It's now after 1 in the morning as I type this and I decided that today's post would be whatever random thoughts that pop into my head. First of all I realized that there is no mail link on this page, but that has now been rectified. Second I began fooling around with Flash MX. Not quite as daunting as I first thought but it will take a while to produce something cool. I'm think of making my bio page with flash as a kind of experiment.

I bought the Star Wars Episode III soundtrack today and noticed something I've never seen before. On the back on the CD case as well as on the CD itself, I noticed a large FBI warning about copying. The MPAA has gone on a crusade of not only suing site owners and independent software designers, but also attack students and individual users. Now I'm not condoning illegal copying and from personal experience I have rarely downloaded much, most of what I bought later or never even used, but the MPAA should start to chill out. 7-10 years ago the music and movie industries had the chance to begin the online distribution of entertainment media in a why that would have opened up a new market. Instead these companies gave a big thumbs down to the tech people who came to them with these ideas. Some of these people went on to work on the P2P software we use today, others moved on the codec development or other endeavors. My point is that the MPAA and the entertainment had a golden opportunity all those years ago. Ten years ago PCs where still rather user-unfriendly and all the drag-n-drop applications we have today didn't exist. A 300MB hard drive was considered cavernous and I struggled with a CLI version of Winzip to span a 15MB file across multiple floppy disks (do I even own any of those today?).

My point is that stopping the spread of piracy is a noble effort, but these companies also need to work on an alternative that is better, easier and faster than the current pirate alternative and users will pay for it. The iTunes store is a perfect example. If I could access it in Japan I would be buying songs online. Now if my iPod would only stop crashing and stop making my life difficult.

Random enough?

Wisdom of the Day: If you drink 4-5 litres of water a day, you will have a very intimate relationship with your toilet.

Party Preparations

For everyone who doesn't know or I forgot to email, my spring party is less then two weeks away. My current party series started last August when I decided to have a nice cool chillout apartment party with my 20 or so friends. My apartment can accommodate that number nicely, but somehow it transformed into an almost 50 person bash earning me at least five complaints from my neighbors.

Undaunted, I had a follow-up party in November and much the same occurred with over 60 people showing up for the evening. Once again the complaints piled up again, not to mention the race home from work to cook and the massive cleaning the next day. Now after six months I'm having another bash. This time I've followed a few rules to prevent major problems:

• major noise and people offenders have been omitted from the guest list (okay well not really but it sounds good, no?)
• a cleaning lady has been sorted for a reasonable fee for the next day.
• cooking assistance is just in the next neighbor and will work for beer.
• the neighbors on my left side have moved out (I had nothing to do with it, but it helps)

These parties are a good way to have a large amount of alcohol and piss off a large number of people simultaneously while not spending a lot of money. I've included a few pics mixed up in this post to give you an idea.

Wisdom of the Day: Always trust in the Mojo

Strange Golden English

I've had these pictures on my hard drive for a while, but I thought that they would be a good example of some of the strange English one can encounter here in Japan. There are many more examples; I wish I had taken more pictures.

Right now Japan is in the middle of Golden Week. It's a string of holidays that were arranged together to give the hard-working people of Japan some well deserved time off. My favorite is the former emperor's birthday (April 29^th) which has been changed to Green Day. Not saving the Earth green, but green as in “why is he wearing that puke green shirt??

Unfortunately the Japanese Diet hasn't organized it well and from the period of April 29^th to May 8^th, they have to work on Monday and Friday, effectively destroying any chance of getting a nice full week to travel somewhere. Of course they could take an extra day, but that's a rarity in this culture. I hope all Japanese people can at least find some rest bit during Golden Week and try to be genki in my lessons.

Meanwhile, the final death toll in the terrible train crash in Amagasaki is 107, including the driver who was killed when the train crashed head first into an apartment building. People here have become apprehensive about their trains and major reviews are beginning to a large number of train services here. I would like to give me condolences to all the families and friends of the victims of that crash.

Wisdom of the Day: A woodchuck could theoretically chuck 390,739,203.25 grams of wood, if so inclined.