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As every bored gaijin knows, you’ll learn tons of interesting things with a quick read of the Men for Women ad section in Metropolis (yea, I know, I know… Look, we were stranded at First Kitchen after spending 20 minutes attempting to stop a cab at 3am in the Tokyo blizzard: you try and find better options for easy entertainment…). You might not actually “learn” anything even remotely useful, insofar as the collective IQ of all contributors probably doesn’t even reach the temperature of my armpit on a cold winter day. But at least you’ll laugh your ass off.

We advise our sensitive readers to skip the rest of this entry altogether, as it contains displays of blunt moronism and enough cliché molestation to make a live sport commentator blush like a little girl.

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I think it was during an hopeless attempt to explain some utterly untranslatable nerdy joke to Eriko, that she admitted she had never seen Star Wars (talking about the original trilogy here, not that poor excuse for a pop-corn commercial they made recently). I thought about it, and realized I probably hadn’t seen all three episodes ever since I was a kid. Hence, tonight was Star Wars night, the first two episodes (kept Return of the Jedi for next time).

Watching it again and having to help Eriko with the story (we only had English subtitles) made me notice many funny details; some of these were quite obvious to me as a grown-up, and the rest is certainly widely known among fanboys circles. But anyway:

  • The whole Japanese theme is definitely all over the place: Jedi only seem another name for Samurai, Darth Vader’s helmet is straight from the Shogun’s era and all their fights are conducted using some sort of space-katanas.
  • The mystics/metaphysics angle, however, seems more inspired from Taoism than Bushido. In fact, if you take some of Yoda’s quotes and replace “the Force” by “the Tao”, I’m pretty sure you’ll find them verbatim in the Tao Te Ching
  • There’s a blatant Shakespearean moment, in Empire Strikes Back, when the big hairy dude is left to lament with the lifeless parts of one of the droids (C3PO or R2D2, can never tell which is which). When he sits down and takes the droid’s head in his hands, you would probably hear him call out for Yorick if you could understand his growling…
  • That one is actually a very widely known bit of trivia to anybody who’s lived in the Bay Area: these weird four-legged machines attacking the rebel base in Empire are exact replica of the cargo cranes you can see when you drive to Oakland from the Bay Bridge (they do look quite ominous too if you catch them at sundown).

I’m sure there are tons of other trivia to catch, but these really popped out when watching tonight…

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Meishi 1 Meishi 1

More than two months ago, I asked Eriko to help me get a new meishi, and she came through with a whole bunch of cool designs. So cool in fact, that I really couldn’t decide on a single one.

So I went with two designs, which I will each use for separate purposes. I might even add a third one, depending on how these two come out.

I had been slacking on getting them printed, but finally figured I really needed to get moving (in Japan, even more so than in other countries, exchanging name cards is a mandatory part of any conversation that doesn’t involve ordering a big mac with fries).

This is the semi-final design (still considering other font options) and I shall be sending it off to the printer tomorrow. Any suggestions?

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‘been a very long time since I have posted anything about Tokyo’s most notorious pit hole… Time to fix this oversight!

Legend has it that, back in 1929, one of the few guys to make money off the market crash – Joseph Kennedy Sr., I believe it was, but the name hardly matters since this story is probably made-up anyway – was wise enough to take all his marbles off the playground before it sunk, when he overheard shoeshine boys in the street exchanging stock tips.

If 15-year old shoeshine boys start investing in the stock market, was his thinking, it’s high time to get the hell out and start selling short. He was right, and his clairvoyance pretty much built the Kennedy’s fortune and indirectly resulted in Jackie getting a very heavy dry-cleaning bill, thirty years later in Dallas.

Of course, while Economics 101 textbooks love to give you this fairy tale as an illustration of the danger of uninformed speculation, the truth more plausibly resides somewhere in Joseph Sr.’s arm-length records of insider trading and stock pulling. Hell, he might even have been one of the guys giving that last tip to a stock market teetering on the edge for months.

Then what is the moral of this story, I hear you ask. And more importantly, what the hell does it have to do with Roppongi?

Well, a modern day version could be thus: When you start bumping into pimply junior-high-schoolers while ordering drinks, it’s really time to get the hell out.

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This entry was originally gonna be a comment posted on Dave’s Chalkboard in response to this post. But then I realized it had taken the size of a novella, and furthermore, most of its content is probably relevant to other people too. So here goes another entry about Spam Karma…
Sorry, I know this is getting tedious, I’m tired of talking about it too… I promise this is the last time you hear about it until I finally get off my ass and release SK 2.0

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You know, despite my best efforts, I have never managed to reach celebrity status in Japan… and when I see the kind of humiliation my friend the “talento” has to go through, every time he is featured on TV (full story for another day), I am quite happy with that.

However, I can now die a happy man, since a small part of my work has finally been recognized for what it’s worth, and featured in a Fijian Newspaper. Yea, you read correctly: I am a star in Fiji.

Well, kinda.

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Today: Yellow Coconut Curry!

To my surprise, last week’s first edition of Recipe Mondays was met with unmitigated success among the blogging crowds. And because we thrive to please our public, here at Dr Dave Logs Inc., I shall do my best at keeping up with the now firmly established tradition of Recipe Mondays!

What? It’s not Monday anymore? Well, I’m sure it’s Monday somewhere else in the world right this moment. Internet time, all that…

By the by, talking about Monday…

Part 1: The Rant

I guess saying I despise Valentine’s Day and its commercial faux-fluffiness would make me sound like some kind of bitter dateless hater, or at the very least like an unromantic grinch who can’t enjoy an honest-to-goodness holiday when he’s handed one on a heart-shaped silver platter.

First let me clear that out: if I didn’t thoroughly enjoy being single on Valentine’s Day, then why on Earth would I manage to break up every single year without fail just a few days before it. Surely there must be some sort of subconscious fear that, come that fateful day, any lingering relationship, would require me to attend some kind of official Valentine’s celebration, likely out of common decency and possibly at gunpoint.

In fact, I don’t really hate Valentine’s that much. I am not this person who spend their day hissing at whatever looks like a mating attempt between two humans… It’s just that I don’t get it. I don’t get what’s so “romantic” about buying cheap industrial crap and/or overpriced luxury items as the yearly token of your undying love. If anything, it just goes to show that gender equality hasn’t made much of a significant progress ever since the dark ages, except you no longer pay your bride’s father with a herd of goats, but give the payment to your loved one directly, and preferably in expensive shiny stones.

But truth be told, I don’t really care, one way or the other, about the materialism of it all (hey, after all, ’tis Japan: over here, I am the one who receives chocolates for Valentine’s). I could live with it, if not for that freaking herd mentality.

Hear me now: I haven’t completely lost touch, I am well aware that any celebration is all about herd mentality.

But take, for example, that exercise in futility that is Superbowl Sunday: We all know Superbowl Sunday has little to do with watching the terminally boring encounter of two dozen gorillas on a green field… it’s all a very blatant excuse to get absolutely shitfaced with your friends on a Sunday afternoon and pass out in bed at 7:30pm. For you and me, it might not sound so exciting, especially seeing how that’s what we do every Sunday to begin with (well, I know that’s what I do anyway), but for some married folks, it does make a difference.

Problem is: while it might add to the fun to wedge yourself between 50 of your fellow beer-swilling football fans at your local watering hole, it adds very little to the romantic frame to be competing against every other couple in the city for mediocre seating at some not-so-great restaurant on Valentine’s Day. You might enjoy a communal atmosphere on your intimate dates, I don’t.

What? A recipe? oh yea… the recipe…

Part 2: The Recipe

What better way to celebrate the Day of Love than by cooking a delicious Yellow Coconut Curry to share with your roommate and your very-much-ex special someone (yea, no hard feeling, at least as long as I cook).

Yellow Coconut Curry is so laughably easy to make that even I hesitated to use it for this week’s recipe. But then I remembered that if you are the kind of person who gets his cooking advice from a website that usually draws people searching for “japanese upskirt pictures” (according to Google), you are not looking into becoming the chef at Pierre Gagnaire’s (well, might have to get rid of Mr. Pierre Gagnaire, to begin with). Talk about the paraplegic leading the blinds…

Okay, ready?

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The good thing about being up and coding at 5 in the morning, is that you don’t have to wake up in sweat to run for the nearest table, when some underground traffic jam comes up.

Brief, but definitely one of the strongest shake I have ever felt in Tokyo.

This kinda makes up for last month’s tectonic joyride where I was passed out in my bed.

Oh, and one small piece of advice: never leave an open box of sugar on the edge of a shelf in a country prone to earthquakes. Actually, cross that, never have any piece of furniture rising over 3 feet.

Update: According to the news report, it went up to a 5 (Japanese scale) in the Ibaraki area. Not quite sure how that measures up in Richter scale, but that’s quite big (level 7 being total annihilation)…

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I know this might sound hard to believe, but if you know me personally, you know I am quite a good-natured person. I can get irritated at things, but hardly ever go any farther than that.

In fact, provided my meds do not run out, it is awfully hard to really piss me off for good. And to get on my permanent unexpiring shit-list, you have to really overdo it.

One easy way to do it, though, is to successfully DDoS my host on a Sunday morning, resulting in the suspension of my whole account, mail server included.

The debate is still open on whether that was an actual DDoS attempt (I do have many friends out there, and they have been trying similar tricks in the past) or just one the most braindead of that already rather stupid sub-species known as referrer spammers. Granted, my own host hardly showed much efficiency in the matter, since, upon seeing a few IPs querying my blog index.php file upward of 200 times in 50 seconds, they merely took offense of the fact that it was overloading the mySQL server (thanks WordPress and its 70 queries per pageload) and pulled the plug without any further consideration.

A quick look at my logs eventually showed that these hits were pushing some second-grade junk website in their referrer field.

And just like that, unbeknownst to him, that spamming wanker made himself one very decided enemy.

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