by ·Comments Off on Auto-Post: Music To…

Automated posting pre-logged on 05/25/05.

I think by now it’s sufficiently clear that I won’t be coming back for a while: this auto-blog thing is just too damn convenient. Expect the Eliza-blogger-bot to kick in soon.

Music for any and all occasions. No time to linkify, I’ll leave it up to you to check out the tracks at your favorite non-traceable P2P software legal outlet…

Music To…

… Rebel Your Adolescence To:

  • Mala Vida – 2:31 – Mano Negra
  • Kill Your Sons – 3:35 – Lou Reed
  • Common People – 5:51 – Pulp

… Rave To:

  • Horny Hustle – 4:21 – Joeski & Dano
  • Deus – 9:12 – Electric Skychurch
  • Rez/Cowgirl – 11:47 – Underworld

… Be Drunk To:

  • Alabama Song – 3:20 – The Doors
  • Dazed and Confused – 6:26 – Led Zeppelin
  • Les Nuits Parisiennes – 2:31 – Louise Attaque

… Drop To:

  • Pacific 202 – 3:51 – 808 State
  • Guitarra G – 8:40 – G-Club Pres. Banda Sonora G
  • Cool Kids of Death (Underworld mix) – 13:46 – Saint Etienne

… Hug To:

  • Song For Shelter – 11:26 – Fatboy Slim
  • Whistle Song – 8:17 – Frankie Knuckles
  • Little Fluffy Clouds – 9:07 – The Orb

… Snort To:

  • Funky Shit – 5:16 – The Prodigy
  • You Prefer Cocaine – 5:43 – Vitalic
  • Contagious – 3:13 – Adult

… Nurse a Loveover To:

  • Somewhere Over the Rainbow – 4:51 – Israel IZ Kamakawiwo’ole
  • No Communication, No Love – 5:30 – Charles Schillings
  • Nocturne op. 9 – 4:41 – Frédéric Chopin

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by ·Comments Off on Big in Japan

Gen, who works for Technorati Japan just kindly informed me that this blog sits at #37 on the Japan Top 100… Wow…
(it might not last, as understandably, there seems to be some discussion as to whether this blog really belongs in the Japanese billboard)

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Just a quick word to thank all my friends, fans, ennemies and indifferent readers, for their warm support and inform everybody that I did survive.
Everything went mostly as expected. I’m covered head to toe in gauze and been told everything underneath works as well, if not better, than before. Yes, everything: You haven’t enjoyed life to the fullest until you experience the ability to throw peanuts in your mouth without using your hands.

Nevertheless, there are still a couple old entries pre-logged for the next few days, and I plan on letting them be, the way they would have, had I been strong enough to stay away from the net one more week (but I felt like I had to post a little update anyway). While you enjoy all the canned wisdom I was able to pack in one go at the end of last week, I’ll be enjoying a peaceful recovery, speeding away on my magic morphine-propelled cotton cloud.

I’ll be back for real, soon.

Hug’n’kisses everybody…

by ·Comments Off on Auto-Post: My Grandma

Picture gran_club04.jpg This is an automated post logged on 05/25/05.

To put at ease conflicting rumours that the author of these lines might be either the fruit of extra-terrestrial genetic engineering, or spawned straight from the mouth of Hell…

Here is a shot of my grandma…

She was born in Cairo and grew up in colonial Egypt.

Her dad spoke 12 languages, worked for MI-6 and received a lethal gunshot wound while on mission in Vatican at the end of WWI (I couldn’t make that stuff up if I tried).

During the blitz in London, she drove an ambulance under the bombs, while her husband (my granddad) was hard at work figuring a way to Calais that did not involve swimming all the way across.

Nowadays, she does Tai Chi five times a week, goes to her club from time to time, and half-heartedly grumbles about the youth of today, the way only real grandmas can.

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This is an automated post, logged on the 05/25/05.
If, by any chance, thermonuclear war has already taken place and you belong to the surviving race of mutating cockroaches that is now ruling the world, please accept my most sincere congratulations and sorry if the following has lost most of its relevance: can’t plan for everything, now can we…

Of the many places where I am eligible to cast a vote, I am no longer registered anywhere. I am not particularly proud of that, but beside endless hours of bureaucratic confrontations, this unforgivable civic apathy is also saving me many painful choices these days.

Last month was the commons election in the UK, and while voting abroad for this particular election is not that difficult (I did it in the past), I wasn’t exactly subdued by enthusiasm: like a sizable share of the British population, I only suffer the sight of this frizzy-haired prick out of my even stronger contempt for the tories and their stuffed joke of a party (need I even mention what abysses of disgust the BNP and their nauseating 1930’s rhetoric drags me in). All in all, I’d rather impale my own penis on a union jack than ever cast a vote for the British right, but it would physically hurt to give so much as a napkin of support to Bambi, still messy from his marathon blowjob session across the pond. Abstention was, arguably, the only option.

This month, another election, down south in Froggyland, is tearing the masses apart. And ironically, I am also entitled to cast a vote there. Or rather: would be, if the usual French bureaucracy had not quickly and effortlessly convinced me that I really don’t need to spend a week gathering papers and fighting sexually-frustrated clerks to express my electoral opinion on matters that affect my life about as much as the variations of the local French R&B billboard top 10 or the cast of the next Froggy Idol.

And by the way, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard French R&B, but believe me: you don’t want to.

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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….

by ·Comments Off on Geopolitical Ranting: Japan and Asia, pt. 2

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!

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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…

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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.

Laurent, tu sais ce qu’il te reste à faire…