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So, I thought I could keep it like that for a while: avoiding updates and ignoring my blog as much as possible. However I was just contacted by the Technorati Top 100 Blogger Consortium‘s lawyers, threatening to sue on the ground that I am currently infringing on the “blog” trademark by misleadingly labeling this pathetic excuse for a website as such.

According to their cease and desist letter, I am failing to qualify for the Blog©®™ appellation by not complying with Article 1 of the International Blogging Treaty which stipulates that:

Posting rate must be above 6 posts per day. Of which at least:

  • Two must contain pictures of the household pet (can be replaced by household baby or infant if pet unavailable).
  • One must discuss extensively local weather condition and give poorly supported previsions regarding upcoming season change.
  • Two must give a detailed recount of daily office job routine as well as minutiae of every meal ingested during day.
  • Three must contain more than 5 words (though a maximum of two monosyllabic entries is allowed).

International Blogging Treaty, article 1

The fact that I happened to comply with alinea 2 of Article 1, they added, was no excuse for the shortcomings of this site in the other areas: I had to rectify this situation or face the legal consequences.

Not one to be intimidated by such threats, I immediately contacted the dissident United Blogger Syndicate for advice. They assured me that the requirements enounced in Article 1 were absolutely not mandatory.
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For most people outside the US, the word filibuster (flibustier on the French coasts) might only raise some vague memories about scary-looking bad guys roaming the seas in order to loot, rape and sink whatever they get their hook on (no, not talking about Dick Cheney and Haliburton here). In US political legalese, however, it carries a very different meaning.
You better get acquainted with it, as you are likely to hear more of it, provided the Democrat senators get some of their spine back by then.
It is also the only legal barrier that stands between the 48% somewhat sane Americans and their newly elected Emperor’s theocratic vision for America.

To do very, very short:

A filibuster is a way for the minority party to oppose a law that’s being debated in the Senate and that would otherwise easily receive the necessary majority vote, by methodically obstructing the debate and hogging speaking privileges.

Senate rules state that every senator is entitled to two speeches of unlimited duration regarding the matter at hand. Further more, only a tiny fractions of such speeches (3 hours per session, to be precise) is required to be germane (somewhat relevant to the matter at hand), the rest can be about anything, and I do mean, anything (see below).

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I wish I could find something positive to say about all that. Something to heal what feels like one of the worst hangover I’ve had in many years, even though I haven’t even had the heart to abuse my daily dose of cough syrup, let alone wash it down with a quart of rum, for the past two days. Like everyone, I’m looking hard out there for comforting words and reasons not to depress.

But really there ain’t.

Instead, and because we need to try and get our mind on something else for a bit (though I most certainly will come back to it in the near future), here is something to listen to. [Update: removed mp3 file for Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s incredible cover of Over the Rainbow in an attempt to ward off the leeches]

Make of it what you will.

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So, waking up this morning was a bit like a movie:

You go to bed full of hope in the future, confident that tomorrow will be a bright and sunny day where nothing wrong can happen any more, all that, you know…

And when you wake up, there are undead people running across your lawn, destruction and desolation clutter every horizons and the teenage girl from next-door is devouring your boyfriend’s brains.

Or something along that line.

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Picture drdave-godzilla.png Being a bedridden moribund with not much better to do than following the outcome of the next Mister Homecoming America pageant, I guess I ought to be somewhat enthralled by the close race unfolding before our eyes.

Truth is: I don’t really care anymore.

First, Kerry is gonna win the election. by a landslide. [yea, you got that right…]

Many reasons to that. including, but not limited to, the fact that polls did not pay the slightest attention to the radically different political context of this year: much stronger mobilization, mass registration drives among minorities, youngins actually getting off their ass to go cast a vote, since p-diddy and eminem told them to do so… all them people who are usually not George’s best friends. And despite all this, the restrictive sample polled still can’t get itself to give a clear support to the incumbent.
Let’s just say it’s not looking too good for Mr. Yeehaw tonight. Which should have the added effect of pushing most of the undecided morons, off their fence, into Kerry’s garden (“undecided” being just the standard technical term for “whatever the majority decides… baaah…”).

I did not say that Kerry would be the next president, mind you: for that to happen, we would still have to see that poor excuse for an electoral system somewhat working in the direction of the democratic process. A concept that got lost rather early in the application of that massively irrelevant piece of law they call the US Constitution.

It is not totally out of the question either, that a bunch of young republicans lead by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld clad in black denim uniform and cow-boy hats would go and discreetly slit the throat of a few hundreds political opponent while Dubya declares martial law on the ground that Kerry couldn’t have won without the help of the Terrahrists.

Although my guess is that they’ll keep that for 2008.

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Picture CIMG0294.jpg I usually do avoid the whole party report thing, hope you do realize that…
Mostly because I know that, unless you have been drinking free booze all night long, it just isn’t that interesting to hear. Beside, we all have too many snorting-blow-off-hooker’s-tits stories to go around… don’t need any more, do we?

However, tonight was particularly fun, as we were joined for the evening by Jus’ new beau and his friend/colleague, both professional Pride fighters. Following the stereotypical anti-stereotype that wants all massive professional killers to be cuddly huggy-bears in private life, they were absolutely adorable, and quite fun to be around…

So we had Andre the Giant (and in case you are wondering, all the other people on the above picture were already fairly tall) and Justine’s very own Shrek the peaceful ogre.

I must say having them around made the whole Metropolis gaijin meat-market shindig much less boring…
Oh and by the way: that chick, let me venture she didn’t exactly win the prize on the research and effort put into her costume… then again, I can only guess: by the time we made it there, she was merely strutting around the vip lounge in a mini-bra and a glittery piece of fabric that barely managed to hide her g-string….

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And now, award time for most moronic idea of the month, with automatic entrance to the yearly draw.

If you are gonna be cheap enough that you keep old bottles of top-shelf vodka prominently disposed behind your bar to try and give it that international hip flair it quite obviously hasn’t… At least:

  1. Make sure your new barmaid is aware they aren’t the real thing.
  2. When picking a transparent liquid to refill the bottles with, use water, not fucking bleach.

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Picture choco-potato-chips.jpg If I tell you “Milk Chocolate-Coated Potato Chips”… the first thing coming to your mind might be: “Japan!“…
(a close second being “gross!”, if you are not into experimental gastronomy).

And you’d be dead wrong. On both counts.

Come on now, I hope this is not the kind of low standards you’ve grown to expect from this blog: if it was indeed made in Japan, it would at the very least be peppered with nori shreds or sold in giant heart-shaped boxes covered in pictures of sickeningly cute bunnies and atomic vampire robots (yea. both)…

Not in this quaint, sober, nearly tasteful, two-tone, Pringle-style, cylinder box.

No. Let’s be serious: Japanese researchers probably stumbled upon some variation of the Milk Chocolate-Coated Potato Chip (with extra wasabi flavor as an option) decades ago and quickly canned it as way too tame for the domestic market.

American researchers, on the other hand, immediately saw the full potential of such a symbiosis…

All conspiracy theories apart, one cannot help but wonder about the hidden motives of a corporation whose food product combines, in one single ingredient, the two most addictive substances known to Man: Chocolate and Pringles.

Quite obviously somebody has been greasing a few hands at the FDA to slip that one through…

And the kicker? Masako brought this back from SF as a typical sample of them wacky American foodstuff…
ミルクチョコレートポテトチップス。変な日本の食べ物？
違うアメリカから！
もう変なですけども。。。

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今日は誕生日です。厄年ですから多分お寺に行こうね。

Fair Warning: this entry is quite likely the most bloggish, pseudo-teenage-angst-ridden, self-indulgent, boring, piece of navel-gazing ever written on this blog (and a quick look at the rest should convince you this is no small feat).

My cat, who is usually my most patient reader, fell asleep halfway through: you probably won’t fare any better. I’m mostly writing this because it’s more considerate than hogging a friend’s ear for a whole evening of uninspired confidences. It’s also much easier to erase in the morning when I get over it.

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Busy is a pale euphemism to describe the current chaotic state of my life right now.

If I tell you I am currently a full-time music producer and arranger, full-time VoIP server architect and full-time applied mathematics student, you might get an idea of what I mean. And there is no mistake in the previous sentence: the word full-time is purposely used three times because I am very much supposed to be doing each of these occupation full-time. Which is kind of a problem given that Earth rotation period seems to be stalling around 24 hours these days. Factor in my current involvement with WordPress development as well as my attempts to keep an appearance of social life by making regular expeditions with friends to nasty local watering holes where we proceed to get absolutely plastered on cheap sake… and you have a mathematical impossibility the likes of which even Gödel would give up on.

Since there are only so many hours of sleep you can remove from your daily schedule before permanent psychosis sets in (I mean, real psychosis, not the milder form of borderline psychopathic behaviour I usually retreat to on a good day), and since I also decided that food could not safely be removed from my daily essential needs, I had to cut down on other activities. As a result, my news readings has long fallen from many hours of intense paper scrutinizing, down to a 30 second scan of my RSS feed list and a few occasional glances at online news articles, every other week… As for TV: I have barely ever watched it in my life and the only TV set of the house is currently stored in my roommate’s room where neither of us ever turn it on, so it isn’t much of an issue.

So we can safely say that I know close to nothing about the big (and small) events of the world these days, except for the rough outline (Bush has not yet declared martial law in the US, Ishihara still hates foreigners and Tokyo maintains a precise average daily temperature of: “very hot”)…

Hell, for all I know, the War of the Worlds has already begun and I am talking (writing, really, but anyway) for a bunch of unmanned computers sitting atop the ashes of what used to be the proud western civilization, while Godzilla is busy fighting evil alien spaceships off the coast of Japan.

当節は仕事や勉強だからすごく忙しい。Continue reading