Party announcement at the bottom »

How do you do when you completely and unabashedly forgot an ex’s birthday? With no valid excuse whatsoever, if only a very busy day and a genetic inability to remember dates correctly (I swear I thought it was tomorrow). And don’t tell me suck it up, apologize and get a nice gift: she’s quite the vindicative type too. After all, she made sure to wait until the following morning at 8am to inform me that I was officially an arsehole… you know, just making sure I had no wiggle room for white lies…

Which brings me to the problem of my day so far: what to do…

Which you probably do not give a rat’s ass about. And truthfully, who am I to blame you.

But let’s not ruin the mood. I guess we’ll just have to double the usual morning tequila sunrise and consider our quota for public humiliations and shameful exposures fulfilled for the whole month. And that’s always a good thing: you don’t really want to stock up on past dues for these kind of quota.

Cue mandatory sakura blossom speech.

Everybody will have, by now, noticed that the sakura blossom is upon us. At least I know I have. But I would have little excuse, seeing how every other street in my neighbourhood instantly turned a rosy white color and I no longer see my breath upon waking up (which means either one of two things: my new toothpaste is working much better than the previous one. Or it’s getting warmer). That, and also half the trains on the Yamanote have been busy giving day-by-day updates about the state of the sakura front (unlike, say, some people who could have at least hinted that there was an important upcoming date, last time we talked).

There are basically two schools of hanamist:

Some will defend the inscrutable beauty and zen symbolism of the spectacle, and take comfort in their ephemeral regularity, seemingly changeless, yet each time unique. Those people, particularly the gaijin among them, will tend to grow copious amount of facial hair and put on traditional samurai armors to charge at locomotives on their horse, thus ensuring an edifying finale where they can get a last dying glimpse at the sakuras down below, before heading out for the land of their ancestors.

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One for each country, around Roppongi Hills…

Sun, wifi, outdoor seating…
Give me business meeting like that any day!

Still the same ridiculous hairdo, but this time with a GPS-enabled cellphone!

Having a drink with Tracey in 思い出横町

It is usually pointless to pay any attention to whatever offensive comment Shintaro Ishihara manage to spew with regularity, seeing how he makes little secret of his goal to alienate about every single non-Japanese human being on the planet. The fact that he is the Governor of the greater Tokyo area makes it all the more pathetic.

His last display of xenophobic moronism, though, did manage to make me laugh in disbelief quite a bit.

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Started playing around with a new layout for this blog.

Not the final version by any mean…

I had to separate the redesign in two phases. This is only the first phase: structural changes.

Second phase (actual theme change) will come later, when I’ll be done with the coding and can concentrate on finding inspiration (I cannot code on mushrooms: just doesn’t work).

Jeremy took this interesting shot of Rie smoking a ciggie during our afternoon’s wine and cheese in Aoyama Cemetery last Saturday…

Only took a few pics, this WE

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昨日は面白かったね！
あの後も、少し離れた場所でミニマルテクノのフリーパーティーやってたよ

Guess what we be doing all morning?

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Like most people here, I have an ambivalent love relationship with Japanese ATMs.

I mean, who doesn’t love their ubiquitous salaryman-foodstamp dispensers: after all, they are lovable, sexy and incredibly serviceable.

Until night falls, that is. At which point they suddenly emerge clad in leather, whip you into submission, make you bend over and ram your every orifice, strictly foregoing the use of any lubricant.

Which, come to think of it, does remind me of a few ex’…

Ahem. Anyway.

Japanese ATMs are sometimes very convenient. For example, despite living in an über-residential neighbourhoods where most of the locals are either dead or not too far, and banks an unheard-of commodity, I only have to walk a hundred feet from my door to the closest ATM-equipped combini.

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