This is an automated post logged on the 05/25/05.
No telling where I’ll be when you are reading these lines. Chances are I’ll be alive and well, provided my surgeon has finally kicked off the bottle. Bah, don’t sweat over my little self: most likely I’m laying in bed, trying to con my way into an extra dose of morphine in my IV drip…

Did you know that, when undergoing surgery, most of the risk usually stem not from the surgery itself, but from anesthesia.

Dosing the poison that will knock you out while a surgeon opens your inside, requires rather intricate calculations involving dozens of variables, weight, medical past, heroin habit, alcohol consumption etc. etc. Neglect one of them and you get acquainted with the laws of physiological chemistry the hard way. Being an anesthesiologist sure must be a fun job.

And if you think that dosing in excess is the worst that can happen to you: there’s a matter open to debate here.

Put it this way: would you rather not wake up, or wake up with a scalpel halfway up your abdomen. I know where I stand there.

Anyway, in such matters, being a pathologically thin boy is never a good idea. To all the overweight people with a complex out there, you can at least find solace in this. Putting some weight on is much harder than you’d be led to think. It can be a pretty daunting task, actually. Of course, there are pills on the market, but personally, I am deeply prejudiced against any pill that does not make me hug strangers or wiggle rhythmically to trippy house music.

The upside of this risk, is that once a surgeon cuts you open, he might as well do some extra work. According to my esteemed physician, provided you don’t crowd a particular area at once, it’s a surgical free for all. Surprised as I was, I did not skip this rare occasion, of course: I told him to go for it. It’s always been my dream to have a prehensile penis.

Otherwise, as you’ll have noticed, I won’t be behind a keyboard for quite a while: hospitals seem to be still lacking on the Wifi, and so will likely be the mediterranean beaches where I’m hoping to enjoy a healthy recovery. I’ll miss you all, I’m sure you’ll miss me. But just in case, I’ve left you a few automated gifts, that should come up on this blog at regular intervals…

See ya….

Sorry, it’s been more than two weeks since I promised you a second installment to my fascinating (and utterly unqualified) ramblings on certain aspects of Japanese modern history… You see, I still haven’t received a positive answer from these senile bastards at Harvard or Yale about that Chair of Political Science, and therefore had to keep with plan B for the moment: something about convincing another bunch of senile bastards that I do know something about Applied Mathematics and Fluid Mechanics, which has left me very little time for this sort of rambling.

Do not worry: given the chances of failure for Plan B, I am already hard at work on the details for Plan C, which essentially involves robbing my local combini with a pair of sharpened chopsticks and running as far as I can in the overall direction of the nearest beach resort.

Anyway, yea, back to the topic at hand: these evil, evil Chinese demonstrators marching on Japanese embassies, armed with deadly eggs and rotten vegetables…

No wait. sorry. I think we were rather about the mass killing of civilian troops, systematic rape, biological warfare, and a whole lot of other very nasty things Japanese did during the war: OK, back on track.

Let’s start by reverting the course a bit and adding some much needed balance to all the negative stuff that’s been spewed about Japan in the past entry:

War and Patriotism in Modern Japan

From my remarks on Japan’s inability to face up to its past and accept the slightest responsibility for the atrocities comitted during WWII, one might get the impression that modern-day Japanese are bloodthirsty monsters eager to invade all their neighbours and start it all over again…

Nothing could be further from the truth.

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Against all odd, I’m done packing and still have 30 minutes to go catch the Narita express.

I could just go now and insure that I am actually early to catch a plane once in my life, but why bother.

Actually, when taking a flight out of peak-season, it’s always a better strategy to show up fashionably late for check-in. This may sound like dubious advice, coming from the guy who missed a few planes in recent years, but on the other hand, I have also boarded hundreds of flights without hassles. Check-in employees are way less stressed once the rush is over, it’s easy to make small talk and get whatever you want, whether it’s a potential upgrade, or just a seat on an empty row (there’s always one or two fully empty rows on off-peak flights, and getting them at the end of check-in means you stand good chance they’ll remain so).

So instead, I’m running a last-minute assessment of current situation, before moving on for the month.

• Neighbourhood cats seem a bit worried to lose both their main source for food distribution and access to the dry shelter of my room, which I understand can suck, especially when monsoon season is geared to start in a week or two. They have been following the packing process closely and, as I speak, there’s a fair chance I might be about to smuggle unwittingly some of Tokyo’s finest stray cat on the European continent. I guess it’ll be the surprise on arrival.
• Herb garden is going through another rough phase: while the cat problem has been successfully dealt with, my once flamboyant arugula is suddenly showing signs of decay. Simultaneously, I couldn’t help but notice that caterpillars in the vicinity seemed particularly healthy and well fed. If the situation hasn’t somehow stabilized by the time of my return, I am afraid we will have to consider chemical warfare. Napalm or agent orange are the two top options at the moment.
• Underwears are packed. I had a strange dream last night that essentially involved forgetting to pack my undies. My subconscious really has fucked-up priorities. The socks supply dearly needs replenishing (single socks have been disappearing at an alarming rate lately: I suspect the cats. Wouldn’t put it past these thieving bastards). Good thing, you don’t have to remove your freaking shoes to eat in a restaurant where I’m heading.
• Passports are packed in separate places, and color-coded, which will avoid repeating embarrassing mistakes and having to spend unnecessary time with an immigration officer convinced he has caught Al Qaida’s number 4.

Ok, see you on the other side!

When the apex of your kanji reading abilities is being able to handle automated furikomi (money transfers) on your own (the mere action of paying my monthly rent, fearlessly navigating 50 screens of instructions on the local ATM machine, is enough to bring me a deep feeling of achievement for the remainder of the day), it is dangerously easy to fool yourself into thinking you can actually read some of this barbaric language.

Lucky for me, just when it might happen, something comes up to remind me that I’d still get my ass kicked at japanese crosswords by any 5-year old.

Even if that reminder is some utterly stupid technical detail of tear-inducing banality. The fact that it resulted in the waste of a complete afternoon and nearly failing to secure my plane ticket in time for my departure, sure helped giving it due attention.

For those of you wondering, just note that Sumitomo Trust (住友信託) and Sumitomo Mitsui (三井住友) most definitely aren’t the same bank. And moreover: Sumitomo Mitsui is spelled freaking backward in Japanese (Mitsui first), thus appearing under the マ (‘ma’ and other ‘m’ sounds) section, not the サ (’sa’ and other ’s’ sounds) section. As such, even if 住友信託 is the only bank appearing under that section and your brain tells you it looks close enough to be the bank you are supposed to make your transfer to, believe me: It’s not.

Well, all that to say that I’ll be off the island from the end of this week until the end of next month. Please feed the Godzilla when I’m away and take him out for a bit of city-stomping at least once a week, his cans are in the top left shelf in the cupboard. Rie is taking care of the garden and the cats.

bipppu no ato ni, messeiji wo rekohdo shite kudasai…

Yesterday, a session of the French senate was interrupted when a young man suddenly jumped from the public balconies, onto the actual senate floor, wearing but a thong, adorned with the colors of the French flag.

This [somewhat prudish] streaker managed to briefly voice his position on an upcoming national referendum, before being manhandled to the door. For added visibility, said position (a very unequivocal “NON” to the adoption of a European-wide constitution) was written all over his body, including his bare buttocks.

The man got out with only a few bruises (it’s a good 10 feet drop), a stern warning from the authorities and a newfound popularity on the evening-show circuit. Quite a good deal, if you consider how many bullets the coroner would currently be extracting from his corpse, had he tried a similar trick in the US.

Yuki recently blogged her experiments with FaceAnalyzer.com. It sounded fun, I decided to go see for myself.

FaceAnalyzer is a website that claims to be able to give you, from a mere picture, an automated breakdown of your “race” (which, may I remind you people, in the case of humans, is mostly a social construct, with hardly any ground in biology), along with an estimate of your “Intelligence”, “Ambition”, “Risk” (whatever the hell that may be), “Gay Factor”… complete with, I kid you not: Income bracket…

Now I know what you think: quite a bit of pseudoscience, mixed in with a whole lot of outright quackiness…

Only one way to know, right?

Upon submitting a fairly broad sample of my likeness, in various states of drug-induced haze, hair color and cheekiness, the results were rather mitigated:
While I can certainly accept the possibility that I may have a fair share of East-Indian or Chinese blood in me (please no “ever had some [insert ethnicity] in you?” joke here), I find it a bit harder to accept that I’d be a woman (as the system insisted on pointing out, in every single case)… Although that would explain a certain fascination for lace undergarments and a secret passion for knitting I always attributed to my deviant morals… But in that case, wouldn’t all the lesbian action give me a “Gay Factor” at least somewhat above average?

Obviously not very conclusive. But science makes mistakes… One should not draw hasty conclusions and bluntly discard such breakthrough technology as “money-making snake’s oil scheme” without at least a second chance…

So I bravely submitted a picture of my brother’s cat, and I must say the results are troubling.

• Indeed, the cat is FEMALE! Most definitely has a good deal of middle-eastern ancestry, in fact, her lineage can probably be traced to every other urban slum of the Eurasian continent, with the odd pedigreed tomcat here and there…
• Frankly not sure about that “Low Promiscuity” rate: I mean, before she got spayed, the girl could be quite a little trollop around the neighbourhood.
• It is a bit disappointing that she only displays “Average” ambition, but I guess we will have to find solace in the fact that she is destined to make at least $30,000 a year… not bad for a cat who doesn’t even have her high-school degree.

I’ll be contacting my brother shortly and urge him to stop wasting her talent on stupid things like chasing rats and rummaging around the neighbourhood: that cat has potential (Beta Academic potential!), she needs to be put to work!

By the way, physiognomy is not a new idea. It hasn’t been given the slightest bit of scientific credibility over the past 50 years, though.

As for how the website gets its “uncanny” success rate regarding geographical phenotypes: any first-year computer science student can get the same results with a big-enough sample database and some very low-grade face-matching algorithm. Any rating merely suggest a match with existing pictures of a certain ethnicity, which is well below the crease of scientific procedure, hence the wild margin of error. In fact a properly trained neural network would probably give vastly superior results on some criteria (such as gender, for example).

Needless to say that detection of personality traits such as “Gay Factor”, “Promiscuity” or even “Intelligence”, through face analysis, is complete and utter bullcrap. The last people with an academic background to have given it some sort of scientific credence ended up cracking capsules of cyanide in their mouth, approximately sixty years ago.

WordPress 1.5.1 is now officially released. If you are a WordPress user, you really ought to upgrade. This version fixes many of the bugs and shortcomings that were introduced with the botched release of WP 1.5. It takes seconds to upgrade from 1.5 (just overwrite everything in your blog directory except the wp-content directory). Shout out to all WordPress developers and contributors… Great job guys…

With this, I am glad to announce the official release of Spam Karma 2’s first public beta.

In fact, it is pretty much final-grade quality and could probably do without the “beta” label… I’m just a big fan of the greek alphabet.

Many of the lingering issues with the last alpha have been fixed, a few missing features have been added (it now supports curl for those whose host doesn’t allow url_fopen). Check out the dedicated page for details.

Now go and spread the word! there are still far too many clunky SK1.x in the wild out there…

Also, feel free to contribute to the newly-opened official Wiki page for SK2: your help is much appreciated!

Update: Ahem, it would appear I spoke a bit fast. There is a rather nasty bug in this update that can bork your RSS feed. I do recommend updating nonetheless (and follow instructions in the link above to fix the bug).

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Last week-end was the start of a string of holidays known as Golden Week in Japan. All the happy wage-slave masses left Tokyo for a week-long exodus to some exotic location. And because I was stupid enough not to pick Medieval German Poetry, Sociology or some equally bulshittable major, back in the days, I was stuck meditating and doing equations in my garden, fighting with the cats over the few sunbeams that could make it through Tokyo’s many layers of pollution…

Seeing no reason I’d be the only one having an awful time, I figured I would use some time on the side to bring you my thoughts on the heaviest and most uninviting topic possible: Sino-Japanese Relations Through the Twentieth Century to our Days.

Sounds fun, innit?

Actually, this is kind of a trendy topic these days.

To be fair, the “trendy” part is rather limited, and even more so, depending on which side of the Japanese Sea you live on. But around here, this was most definitely the talk of the month, in Japanese news and all over the English-speaking nipponoblogosphere… Hell, even this guy stopped staring at his dick long enough to write a reasonably thoughtful entry on the topic.
Another very interesting read is Michael Panda’s transcription of the incriminated textbooks (you need to scroll way down to the end).

I figured I would just add my own two yens, and if possible extend it past the perspective of personal-level anecdotes: not that they do not have their place in the debate, but there should be a little more to it than the usual “oh yea, here is what the few Japanese I know say about it”…

If you are looking for a fun and entertaining read to kill the next 20 minutes, this most definitely is not it…

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Today is Cinco de Mayo…

Or, as Lori once explained to her superstar DJ of a husband: “This is when my people kicked your people’s ass, Frenchy”…

Happy Cinco de Mayo to Lori, Ricardo, Gustavo and every other cool Mexicans out there… Have a dozen margaritas for me…

The definition of cruel is when your friends, over at your house for some lo-key, yet highly inebriated, bbq dinner, drunkenly (and unwittingly) opened that one very special bottle of Piper Heidsieck Special Millesime.

No. Hold on. Cruel is when it turns out they drank but a glass and left a full uncorked bottle sitting there for you to mourn in the morning.

Inhumanly cruel, is when all this takes place in the middle of your shot at reaching ascetic enlightenment, and subsequent self-imposed ban on all forms of alcohol consumption.

If I end up not drinking off that bottle today, I will personally write in a demand for a medal from the British National Temperance League.

This last bout of sub-tropical temperatures has officially marked the end of Winter around here. And with the end of Winter, naturally comes the end of seal hunting season. Melancholic times indeed.

I was mournfully cleaning my seal clubbing gear, yesterday night, getting it ready for off-season storage, when Hiromi asked me, out of the blue, why I hated Nature so much.

Why do I hate Nature so much?

I don’t hate Nature.

Not on most days.

First, and without wanting to get too much into “who did what” etc, I can’t help but notice that Nature kind of started it.

Otherwise… Nature does have a few cool things: volcanoes, lychees and these crazy little squirrels that fly between trees. lemurs are way cool too.

Though for every little cool thing it does, Nature has to fuck it up with the details. Like the way lychees are mostly one huge annoying pit with minuscule bits of yummy fruit around it, or the fact that the squirrels in my garden most definitely can’t fly (I know that for a fact: even with assistance on the take-off phase, they just don’t seem to glide their way down at all)… As for volcanoes… well, we all know about the many small impediments that come with their cool visual effects.

Lately, my daily fight against Mother Nature has involved preserving a small parcel of my garden against the evil claws of certain furry creatures, whose sad lack of appreciation for the refined art of herb gardening, is only made more glaring by their persistence in picking that precise spot, out of my whole freaking garden, as their personal toilet.

The first strike came as both a shock and a bitter disappointment, seeing how I virtually considered these filthy felines, my own blood, secondary to the many food-bonding experiences we had shared over the past few weeks. But, ungrateful bastard that they are, my disinterested offerings did little in prompting their respect for my innocent sprouts of thyme and italian basil. It did however provide me with an easy way to solve the problem with its source. Or so I thought.

Unfortunately, deceitful as they are, cats also seem endowed with a powerful sense of smell and they disdainfully ignored my strychnine-laced bacon (fear not: it didn’t go to waste. good things these damn crows will eat about anything).

Then I remembered that old trick of using potato nets to keep cats away from your flower beds: apparently, these ostensibly intelligent critters will happily dig through your petunias, but freak out at the sight of a brightly colored plastic mesh. Only problem with this brilliant idea was that, as it turns out, the potatoes sold by my local supermarket are wrapped in… plastic. I kid you not.

Onions do come in a net. A small one. That’s two onions and 15 square inches of protection for my garden.

I did contemplate buying 40 onions in order to get sufficient covering capacity. But a short period of reflexion led me to realize that spending 10,000 yens in unneeded perishable products in order to preserve 300 yens worth of cultures, just wasn’t a very sound investment.

Landmines were considered. And ruled out.

I was busy carrying out the next option (sharpened chopsticks buried two feet under ground and covered with a thin mesh of dead leaves and dry twigs), when I figured it’d be worth a try to just stick them above ground, in a tight formation over the sensitive area…

Incredibly enough: it worked.

As it turns out, making half my yard into a giant wooden porcupine seems to have finally sent a message to the local cat population. Or at least made the whole bathroom experience sufficiently uncomfortable that they chose to take their morning habit elsewhere.

Dave: 1 – Nature: 0

And by the way, a word of clarification regarding baby seal hunting: Nothing personal, really. It’s just that they make such comfy slippers.

I bet none of you did notice that smooth server migration (unless, that is, you were one of the poor fool who tried using either unknowngenius.com or wp-plugins.net during the past 5 hours). Everything should be back to normal now, please contact me if you notice anything broken…

Why’d I change?

While not exceedingly bad (compared to the worse I had), my former host, HostForWeb, really had sub-par uptime (2 or 3 failures a month on average), rather sluggish performances and downright asinine handling of the last DDoS attack on my server (upon seeing one single IP pulling my index page 50 times a second, they simply disabled my account in the middle of a week-end: that is just retarded)…

Renewing my contract for a year with HFW being out of the question, I went with Site 5 instead: they came heartily recommended and their rates for the amount of disk space (one of my biggest priority) is damn near incredible (I’m getting three times what I was getting on HFW, for the same price, and wasn’t getting such a crappy deal either). We’ll see if the rest is on par (so far, so good).

The sharpest among you, dear readers, may have noticed a surge in guest moblogging in recent days.

Indeed, Tracey has joined the powerful ranks of our secret organization, with the established mission to bring a dearly missing element of femininity to these testosterone-drenched pages.

In sticking with the stakhanovist ideals that power this blog, and because no reward shall go undeserved, we promised her a formal introduction as soon as she’d reach the magical threshold of ten posts. Immediately prompting her to deliver, no hold barred, shocking accounts of:

• what she sees from her office window
• what she sees from her office chair…

As you can see, the girl means business…

As long as she leaves gardening up to me, we should be able to find our marks…

OK, she didn’t solely post photos of stacks of paper and urban street parking: she also posted a mug shot of her charming personal sex-slave assistant.

But well before the fascinating insights into the merciless world of a Tokyo power-exec, or even her interesting tidbits on colourful local customs, there is one major reason you should keep an eye open for her contributions: the off-chance of drunken posting featuring nudity and/or behaviours outlawed in at least 15 US states (and punishable by death in 4 of them).

Giving Tracey a cameraphone and moblogging access is a bit like these tv spots for lavish shower products, featuring people lasciviously soaping themselves while the camera always manage to keep the naughty bits tastefully off-frame: there’s that improbable chance the cameraman might one-day trip and show a nipple… a towel fall off unexpectedly… who knows…

Except here, the chances are much higher and the cameraman more likely to be drunk.

But please let that not distract you in any way from the quality of her more traditional contributions to these pages…

N.B: She also has her own dedicated page, where she might one day tell you more about herself. It’s here. At the moment, it only contains the official press kit excerpts, but will no doubt soon be updated with more personable tidbits.

A look at the sins that shape this blogging machine of a man…

And we got in close order:

1. pride
2. lust
3. wrath
4. sloth
5. envy
6. gluttony
7. avarice

What’s your personal Top 7?

This is pointless enough with just what it needs of self-centered drivel in disguise, that it might make it as the next big blog filler around: knock yourself out, but if you do, in the name of all things sacred, just do not call it a meme. Or I’ll personally go all se7en on your ass. Thanks.

Now, you don’t think I was gonna post a list of flaws without some pathetic attempt at justifying them:

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When I grow up, I want to become a snarky jaded bitter old man, just like him. Complete with asshole-tearing writing skills and all.

Ah, I wish…

No, please, don’t object: try as I might, I know I’m nowhere near that level of bitter, yet… I can’t keep up.

Plus, it just might be that I don’t care enough (I’m told caring only comes with age or when you go off your meds).

But I’m sure glad somebody does.