Breaking with that old personal habit of favouring vices over addiction, I decided today that it was high time to resume heavy drug use for a while. And since methamphetamine is so damn expensive round here, I naturally turned to the second best option: Caffeine.

The deal is: I never drink coffee. Or hardly ever. Save for the odd cup or two when meeting people in a coffeeshop (and that’s only because the local Starbucks employees still refuses to this day to serve me Mojitos, even when I am ready to bring my own bottle of Rum). But coffee in the morning (i.e.: before 8pm) is a rarity.

Because of my complete non-addiction to caffeine, and since I still have my old hardcore coffee drinker habits, dosage-wise, those rare instances where I fix myself a cup usually result in uncontrollable twitching and borderline dizziness for most of the day.

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Just in case you haven’t realized: tis not slow… this stuff fell from the trees as it does each year…

Phear the leather-clad ojisan and his ancient bike-cursing powers!

From our stating-the-blindingly-obvious department:

You might have noticed this website has just undergone a complete face-lifting…
For the sake of argument, we’ll say it’s not completely finished… But mostly, it is.

It should look good, or acceptable, on every browsers. If it doesn’t, please let me know. But as usual I can only stress how much better it’s likely to look on real browsers (not Microsoft’s twisted version thereof).

I still need to brush up the menu content at the top of this page (organize, add some more items, update my bookmark list etc), but everything else is now in place. And all modesty aside, I dare say it kicks major ass.

Let me use this occasion to invite longtime RSS reader to pay a quick visit to the online version… While I won’t be stopping to provide full-content RSS any time soon, there are in fact many other incentives to checking the page itself that are not visible in the RSS feed.

For your benefits (and the benefit of other less sharp readers who might have missed hidden jewels of this corporate behemoth of entertainment we run here), let me list a few:

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Hanami Parties Update

or “Welcome to My weekend, my life.com”

If reading the semi-coherent recollection of a drunken stranger’s week-end is not part of your Monday schedule, feel free to just gawk at photographic evidences, conveniently gathered here and there, including the perfunctory tits shot, courtesy of our dear Tracey…

In a scene telling of the spirit of this week-end, yours truly and three of his drunken groupies were seen yesterday night, fiercely decided to rock out the last train out of Harajuku, the same way they’d been rocking out Yoyogi park all afternoon: with lots of drunken debauchery and deep house beats blaring on a portable sound system.

If that’s not yet doing it for you, picture, if you will: the whitest, skinniest guy this side of Brooklyn, manning the most improbable Japanese ghetto blaster ever seen on the Tokyo metro, while the ladies managed to send the poor few salarymen present into abyss of despair: if even the ever-reliable subservient Japanese female could be spotted pole-dancing in a subway car, who was to tell what would be next. But the most awesome part was definitely the widespread toe-tapping around the car: people seemed to, in fact, kinda like it.

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Afterward, we went for the best ramen of all times: so worth the 20 minute wait (the place is quite small and people were lining all the way down the tiny stairwell to the street). Among the many different hand-drawn menus and signs hanging in the waiting room/stairwell, this one cracked us up: basically inviting customer to not blow loudly their nose while at the table…
We capped the evening with a few drinks at Fujimama’s before stumbling home with the last train…

At some point during the afternoon, a group of belly-dancers came by and threw a show… One particularly awesome detail was the guy: playing arabian tunes on his accordeon :D.

No, I’m not being rude, that’s really their name.

1. Miwa and Miwa
2. The whole reason we are there: Sakuras!
3. Tracey kindly offered to help me consolidate my readership by spicing up the photographic material.

The park from Harajuku station. A big group of drummers near the fountain, as usual.

Yea: I used to work here…

See Komei n Justine to sort out tomorrow’s details, meet up w/ Stacia for a drink or ten, go say hi to the J-ster for her bday…
Expect many drunken pics…