How to get a free doughnut in 3 easy steps:

1. Stand in line in front of Tokyo’s most overrated store of the year.

2. Receive free “Service” doughnut, fresh from the oven, served as tokens of appeasement to would-be customers in an attempt to convince them that a 15 minutes wait for chain store novelty doughnuts at 11pm is a worthy use of their time.

3. Leave with your free doughnut.

While taking a walk in the neighbourhood on Sunday, we ran into this house, literally decked in water bottles. Pictures fail at conveying the utter craziness of the arrangement: thousands bottles covering every inch of fence (not to mention seashells and pieces of aluminum foil)… All makes my own half-hearted cat-fighting efforts, back in the days, seem pretty tame by comparison.

Got a new pair to replace the ones I left in Paris…
This model ups the coolness factor a notch by having an air bubble in their sole (so not kidding). Yes, I am wearing the Japanese Edo era equivalent of Air Jordans…

The debate is still up as to whether wearing them in the street makes me a complete tool, given that:
1) I do not work as a rickshaw runner.
2) I am a pale-skinned gaijin.

(current consensus seems to be that points 1 and 2 cancel each other and it’s OK for me to wear them, possibly even cool… but seriously, who cares: they are super-comfy and funky-looking… good enough for me)

Another major problem in Tokyo’s Shinjuku area: hordes of wild elephants roaming the streets and littering.

This Summer, Tokyo Metro is tackling a major issue throughout its network: rampant tanuki infestation…

Helpful signs spread through stations and trains help you spot and identify the cheeky critters. Here seen engaging in such antisocial activities as: biting hands, chasing human preys and staging unauthorized protests…

Let’s hope authorities quickly regain control of the situation. In the meantime please be careful of marauding hordes of tanuki when boarding cars, especially late at night.

And you thought cherry was a bold move…

This Month, Great Illegal Gaijin Campaign: Catch one, get one free…

3 days, 1300 kilometers, 3 universities.
Fuck if I am any more advanced on which one to pick.

Moving on… Hopefully I’ll soon have a couple Tokyo pics to bring
back the mood to now. Unfortunately, I completely omitted to test the
camera on my new keitai before purchasing it and it turns out it has
really crappy lo-light performances… So we’ll have to figure another
way to relate some of the usual late-night debauchery taking place in
my new city of residence…

Never got around to post pics of last year’s Bathroom Project.
Last September, A. helped me redecorate my bathroom walls in the most unoriginal, immature, teenage way we could think of: wacky magazine wallpapering. It took a couple trips to riverside bouquinistes to find all necessary ingredients to that lo-grade art project (that 1978 issue of Spanking International took a lot of crate diving, believe me).

Of course, we knew from the start that our lovingly put-together mural art would have a very limited life expectancy (the walls are being torn down as I write this), but that was part of the fun: it’s all about the ephemeral bathroom art.