Performing a methodical dismantling of Dubya’s last interview to point out the usual million blatant inaccuracies and other flat-out lies, is a hopeless exercise, the futility of which doesn’t escape me…

However, it is fascinating to note how, despite the widely-known fact that he very much dodged the draft, George thinks himself as a “War president“. In fact, he did not mind using the word “war” more than twenty times during the interview, the SF Chronicle reports.

Some people might be tempted to point out that being a “war president” is not exactly a title of pride. But it seems that, in this man’s warped conception of the world, waging improbable wars and raising “alert” levels every other week so as to keep your people in a perpetual state of paralytic anxiety, is a perfectly fine program in itself for a presidential mandate. One would have thought that working on, say, keeping budget deficit under control, fighting unemployment and soaring poverty rates: these would be deemed worthy of making the first-place in a president’s list of achievement; or even: salvaging the last remaining shreds of environmental protection laws that have been so viciously dismembered by his administration over the past three years (like this one’s gonna happen…).

But obviously, there is a much more important priority for the US: “War”.

See, despite appearances, “War” is not just a good pretext to hide all your dirty influence peddling back at home, while a few hundred US GIs and ten times more foreign civilians get blown to pieces: it is also meant to “protect” the American people. From what? certainly not the categorically-imminent-but-not-so-imminent threat of Saddam’s WMD-that-exist-or-will-exist-as-soon-as-we-manage-to-plant-them-somewhere.

From what then? but, why: from terrorism of course!

Remember: all along, we’ve only been going after a single enemy: Terrorism. Protecting sacrosanct american values of [non-dissenting] free speech and right to bear an AK-47 while parking our gas-guzzling SUV, against evildoers from abroad.

But, some may point: it’s now been more than two years, and nothing, absolutely nothing, has happened in the US, not the slightest attempt at bombing a Taco Bell or anything of any remotely symbolic value, in the name of Allah or some other unshaved non-christian pagan god.
Of course, there’s been waaay more than 4,000 violent US deaths in the past year alone, but these were all due to good ol’ american way of crime, nothing involving nasty furriner’s plots.

In this case, inquisitive minds may increasingly inquisitively inquire, why are we still talking about “war against terrorism”? when it seems so obvious “terrorism” has gone on vacation to some warmer coast and left it up to the US to kill themselves skillfully as they’ve always been good at.

Well, rather than referring you to the painfully obvious truth or Dubya’s even more painfully contorted justifications, here is a little joke…

There’s this guy carefully placing ping-pong balls every 5 feet on the ground around Time Square, when another guy comes up to him and ask ” – Say, why are you putting these ping-pong balls all around?”
” – to keep the rhinos away…”
” – but there’s no rhino here!”
” – see, it works!”

You knew it? yea, me too… but apparently G. W. Bush does not, seeing as he’s been playing variations of it in every last one of his speech for the past two years…

The translator is unavailable for a few days. I am currently porting it over to my new server, and rewriting it using PHP along the way… Stay tuned for an update some time soon.

Like everybody here, I heavily rely on keitai mails for my communications.
Unlike most people though (well, that is, unlike most locals), I have a really hard time deciphering the kanji-laden mails my friends send me. Especially given the evil pleasure some of them take into using particularly rare and nasty kanjis.
Of course, there is Jim’s Breen awesome WWWJDIC dictionary out there, and it even has an i-mode version. But given the limitation of my phone (no easy way to cut and paste), it’s rather useless when I need to decrypt a whole email.

Since I was only working like 27 hours a day this week (who need a social life anyway), I decided to write a small script to help me with that.

In a nutshell:

The script works by taking any incoming email and replying with a word-by-word translation, as provided by Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC. In order to make the translation a bit more legible on a phone’s screen, it strips any unnecessary text and replaces HTML tags the best it can.

For the time being, I’m leaving it open for use by anybody as long as it doesn’t start hogging my server’s resources. I’ll probably even release the code for it, although it’s not that impressive and certainly won’t make it into this year’s best hack’s nominees.

To use it, simply forward any email in japanese (kanjis and kanas) from your keitai to: jp2eng @ unknowngenius.com

You should receive back a translation right away.

It’s most definitely a beta version, so it might, and certainly will, have tons of bugs… if you encounter one, and you are so inclined, send me a note and I’ll look into fixing it.

Any incoming mail is logged on the server for security purposes, which means technically I could read them (then again, so could your local ISP with your regular emails), though I certainly have better stuff to do with my time. Nonetheless, if you feel uncomfortable with the possibility of somebody reading the mails you translate, do not use this service.

I’ll appreciate any feedback.

… when you have that:

Japan Another Babylon
Posted 05 November 2003 – 11:39 AM
All of these things seem to be happening in Japan. Japan is possibly another babylon. Japan has frequent earthquakes too. Maybe also a sign. All of the worlds technology seems to thrive from Japan. The funny thing is, is that I feel led to goto the Japanese people. I am pursueing that right now. In the near future I plan on transfering within my company to Japan. God has laid them on my heart. I am currently studying japanese, and God has put me in contact with at least 3 japanese people who are in the US or Japan. Japan in very wicked, I don’t need to go into the Violence or sexuality they portray blatently in there movies and ANIME. As I stated in my “matrix” theory. Japan is a very industrialized nation. They have almost no forest left, everyone lives in apt. technology has taken over thier lives. And I fear America will soon be in the same boat. Pray for me as I strive to do Gods will, and reach out to the japanese people.

OK. Granted making fun of hardcore literal-minded christians is like shooting fish in a holy water font. Especially the kind who do not mind using the word “wicked” in its non-second-degree, we’ll-burn-you-to-the-stake, medieval acception, while keeping a straight face.

But nonetheless, it’s refreshing to know that there are people out there with real concerns about the direction things are going in this world and the soul of these “poor unsaved Asian people”.

And by the way, which country do you think has the highest statistics for murders, robberies, violent crimes and other nasty things most definitely reproved by the official christian rules book and by any decent gentleman in general? And in what segment of this population can we find the most vociferous proponents of unregulated gun ownership?

Yea, that’s what I thought too.


Ever since I had to work there (thus taking that train every night and morning for a few months), this place is forever tied in my head to the hibya line recorded voice: “Roppp’ongi, Roppp’ongi” (note the overly accented middle syllable). It’s like a catchy jingle I cannot get out of my head.

In other news: yes, it still blows beyond words. Even when going there for a good cause.

Picture 040126_0028~01.jpg “Attention Customers:
In order to prevent skipping out on a restaurant bill.
We strictly prohibit leaving before paying the bill.
Manager”

See. Now I’m not convinced that this sign would be considered much of a walk-out deterrent in a US restaurant.

The beauty of Japan is that telling people it’s forbidden to shoplift or a very naughty thing to kill people and steal their money, is still considered the ultimate argument to freeze halt any dishonest plan in the making.

Update: Bigger version here

As you can tell, I’m having a lot of fun playing with colors and my page template…

I eventually came to terms with reality, depressing though it might be: black-all-over, with hues of neon blue here and there, is only really cool for insecure teenagers who like to listen to depressingly bad goth music and took for the safest route in terms of noncommittal fashion decisions. Furthermore, it made it literally painful to read my already laborious ranting.

Beside, white is the new black.

It was high time for a change.

Hence, the current “experimental” aspect of my site… I’m in the process of finalizing a palette of subtle pastel tones that accurately reflect my impeccable tastes and preferably match my delicate complexion. Lots need to be done in terms of harmonizing the code, so bear with me and the many weird visual glitches in the meantime.

And by the way, since I was at it, I decided to try and give a crap about how bad the css looked on certain browsers and platforms that we won’t name so as not to bring any more shame on Microsoft. Thanks to some research and the experience of other users dealing with MS inept support of common Web Standards. I was able to topically disable unsupported css depending on browsers.

Now the page looks ok (or not any worse) on every platforms and browsers I could put my hands on (which means IE, Mozilla and Safari on Windoze and OS X: I’m not the kind of guy who’s gonna go check if his page supports Opera, WebTV and Hitachi Microwaves Oven)… Need I say it definitely looks its best on real browsers.

This interesting text points out the increasingly frequent habit with major media outlets of turning provable facts into mere “quotations” coming from the mouth of political opponents… For example, the fact that the US budget has gone from massively in excess less than four years ago to one of the biggest deficit in US history, is no longer a fact backed by hard cold official numbers: It is a “charge” made by political opponents:

The forecast comes as Democrats campaigning to run against President Bush charge that he has turned a surplus into a deficit.

The all too common story of how newspapers can distort objective information under the dubious pretense of “keeping viewpoints balanced”.


basically too wasted to send these in yesterday… lotsa kitties way past their bedtime hour, roaming around the seedy parts of shinjuku…

If you were to eat ramen in a trendy Japanese restaurant in Greenwich Village, should you slurp your noodles in?

Should you adopt Japanese ramen-eating customs or conform to geography-based local ones that say you are not supposed to make loud slurping noise when eating?

Maybe I should cut down on cough medicine for today.