by ·4 Comments

My new phone conveniently came with a set of dictionaries on an external SD-card. Which has allowed me to give some rest to the incredibly helpful, yet thoroughly worn out, pocket dictionary Karina gave, me the first time I left for Japan, three years ago.

Continue reading

by ·4 Comments

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.

Continue reading

by ·1 Comment

‘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.

Continue reading

by ·Comments Off on Random thoughts from the Week-end
  • Beam bum has finally been added to my list of potential career options with a fairly high probability rating.
  • Drinking lukewarm Dom Perignon off the bottle all night is not as bad as it sound.
  • Drinking lukewarm Chivas Regal around 9 in the morning is as bad as it sounds. But it does help rinsing the taste of sand off your mouth.
  • There are a lot of reasons why you could wake up to your underwear rolled up in a bunch twenty feet away. 3am skinny dipping is only one of them.
  • Among the many things that probably should not be attempted past a certain hour while highly intoxicated (or intoxicatingly high): barbecuing with chopsticks, shooting fireworks and fixing electrical equipment hold a good position. But they can yield great fun nonetheless.
  • Miscellaneous tattoos: an Oakland Raiders logo (shoulder), a large representation of JC on a cross (chest) and a chinese kanji meaning ‘road’ in Japanese (shoulder).
  • Sunscreen spray battle is fun. and retrospectively, quite literally saved my ass.
  • Denny’s is always a safe choice for a Sunday morning fix, even if the eggs are a bit crunchy from the sand that keeps falling in your plate.

by ·Comments Off on Get the STDs, not the Sex…

The trend in modern sexually-repressed conservative america these days, is to brainwash teenagers into proudly pledging abstinence, vowing to preserve their precious virginity for that special day where they’ll tie the knot… or get invited by the priest to join one of his exclusive, altar-boys-only, mass after-party…

In effect, promising to keep doing what they’d be doing anyway. That is: not getting any, for the entire duration of their ungrateful puberty phase.

After all, they are only following official government policy regarding “abstinence as the only viable way to prevent STDs“.

Well the bad news for the proud virgins is that, on top of not getting laid, they do catch sexually-transmitted diseases, as shown by a recent study of the sex lives of 12,000 US adolescents .

How can you catch an STD while — allegedly — not having sex?

Well, that’s the miracle of statistics (and hypocritical bigotry):

The data was gathered from young people aged 12 to 18 who were questioned again six years later.

According to the study, the STD rates were:

Whites who pledged virginity 2.8% – did not 3.5%

Blacks: pledgers 18.1% – non-pledgers 20.3%

Asians: pledgers 10.5% – non-pledgers 5.6%

Hispanics: pledgers 6.7% – non-pledgers 8.6%

The study’s authors say that from a statistical point of view, the rates are the same for both groups.

The explanation for these numbers does not take a genius or a statistician to figure out:

A good number of those teenager who had hastily claimed they’d never consider doing such icky sticky things, must have quickly changed their mind, once the acne wore out and they found out they actually could get a date… And when it got there, I guess it was too late to consider trading Sunday School for Sex-Ed…

Hence proving once more what most experts have been saying all along: shunning sex-ed in favor of abstinence campaigns is not only gonna produce more morbidly stuck-up conservative morons, it will also help spreading AIDS and other STDs.