NYPD Nude

There are a lot of dumb laws on the books in the US, and you sometimes hear about them in humor columns in newspapers and whatnot. But this is the first time I’ve seen them so thoroughly compiled in one place.

Let’s take a look at what laws I’ve been guilty of breaking in my home, the great state of Minnesota.

• Sleeping nude? Check.
• Oral sex? Check.
• Driving a red car down Lake Street? Maybe.
• All bathtubs must have feet? Check.

If those things are wrong, I don’t want to be right. Now I just gotta get some ducks and chickens and it’s off to Wisconsin for me.

The speed of sweat

Jesus Journey is my personal trainer.

I discovered something important yesterday. While during the sweltering Ehime summers I struggled to improve my running speed, after having barely run at all for several weeks I was able to easily beat 7 minutes per mile for 4 miles, with hills, twice this week.

I think the key must be heat dissipation. Not only is it hot here in the summer, but it’s also horribly humid. The high water content in the air prevents your sweat from doing its job, i.e. evaporative cooling, so you just get hot and wet. It’s hard to run when you’re overheated. But now that it’s nice and cool and dry in the evenings, it’s much easier to run without feeling like you’re wading through lava.

In case anyone cares, the “Running” playlist on my iPod goes Journey → Journey → Journey → Journey → サンボマスター → The Postal Service, and then I forget.

Color mii impressed

I’ve been making the most of my youth, living in the moment, sipping of the heady dew that is existence… playing video games.

I picked up Zelda: Twilight Princess when I got my Wii in April and promptly logged 45 hours or so, but never bothered finishing it. Until two weeks ago, that is, when I decided to lay down an ultimatum: No more buying video games until I finish the ones I have.

So I returned to Zelda, in a complete daze as to what the hell I was doing. Where is this dungeon? Who am I killing now? I need to find the Legendary Sword of what? How do I attack again? Oh right you shake this… oh wait no, that makes you fall of the edge into a bottomless pit.

In fits and starts I picked up where I left off, only to discover… horror of horrors! Graphical glitches left and right ruining my immersive game experience. There were white flecks appearing randomly all over the screen, technically known as “polygon tearing”. Apparently my Wii was a lemon, as this is apparently indicative of a bad video card.

So off it went for repair, with shipping paid by Nintendo. I sent it on Monday, got a confirmation email on Wednesday, and had a brand-new Wii back on Friday. Excellent customer service, Nintendo Japan! The only annoying part was having to re-download one-by-one (for free, of course) all of the Virtual Console games I had purchased.

Wii remote condom

On top of that, Nintendo recently began offering free Wii remote condoms because apparently some idiots can’t manage to keep their remotes from flying into the TV or their siblings’ brains while playing. I got mine yesterday, and while I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to buy these things, I suppose they’re nice to have. Remember kids: Always use protection.

Edit: Whoa, whoa! Hold the presses! I’ve just discovered that Nintendo is part of the vast, liberal, pro-gay, anti-God, evil pinko tree-hugger conspiracy that is threatening to molest your children and damn your mortal soul to an eternity of torment. No more video games for me, ever.

Delusions of nothing in particular

For about an hour after running my brain is severely deprived of oxygen. During that time I’m not just sweating profusely; I’m also doing my part to increase the entropy of the universe by letting my mind wander. Today’s gem was this:

A burly but kindly pro football player named Steve is reading to a group of small children sitting on the floor before him.

Steve

Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey.
Along came a spider, which sat down beside her,
and frightened Miss Muffet away.

Pan across the children’s rapt faces. Then cut to Steve smashing the book down on a flaming charcoal grill.

Steve (angrily)

That’ll teach the [censored] to eat curds and whey!

Cut to thick, sizzling steak on the grill.

Announcer

Beef. It’s what’s for dinner™.

Brought to you by Burnable Garbage and the USDA Beef Council.

The Proposal

As promised, here’s a translation of one of my blog posts from mixi. It’s a true story, and is honestly the best thing that happened to me over the last year, which is profoundly sad.

This isn’t an exaggeration or a lie. Last Friday I was actually proposed to.

Since last year I’ve making the rounds at the local elementary schools teaching English. Recently I added daycare centers to the mix, and on Friday I had my first visit to the Ikata Daycare Center.

There I met a cute little four year old girl. In the middle of the playground, countless children swarmed about me. One of them grabbed my hand and said “Mr. A, let’s get married!” with a big smile on her face.

I was shocked speechless for a second, then asked, “How old are you?”

“I’m four!”

“Ok, we can get married in 20 years.”

She thought about this for a moment. “I’ll be five soon. When I turn five can we get married?”

“Haha, ok, let’s do that.”

One of the older boys was nearby listening in. Upon hearing this he scrunched up his face in shock and disgust. “What!? But, then, you’d have to kiss her!”

Right, like that’s the biggest problem with this situation…

I see her in the morning as I walk to work sometimes. She waves frantically with a big smile, and I can hear her scream my name from inside the car as they go by.

That’s me: A hit with the ladies, age 2 to 9.

I am alive

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. I am alive and with all my limbs; no one I know was hurt in the bridge incident.

What little blogging I have been doing has been on mixi, in Japanese, so I figured no one who reads this one would care. Since I’m back home on vacation now, I may translate over some of the more interesting posts.

“What’s going on”, the short version:

• One year of JET down, one more to go. I’m not so enthusiastic this time around.
• I didn’t win any of the translation contests I entered.
• WarioWare: Smooth Moves is the shit.
• The best recent Japanese novel that probably won’t get translated to English is War with the Next Town Over (となり町戦争 Tonarimachi sensō). It was also made into a movie that probably won’t be released outside of Japan.
• I’ve run over 250 miles since I started using the Nike + iPod thingy last summer. My fastest 1-mile is 6’41″.
• Indulging my fetish for standardized testing, I took and passed Level 2 of the Japanese Kanji Aptitude Test (漢検2級 Kanken 2-kyū). That’s the highest level that most Japanese people ever bother getting. Now I have yet another way to alienate the locals.

Creative writing

Overheard on the JR Yosan line…

“Well I suppose I won’t really be alone forever.”

He avoided her gaze, pretending to look intently at the sporting goods store rolling by the train window.

“Oh?”

“Eventually I’ll be desirable simply by virtue of not being a screw-up. I’ll have a job and a car and a savings account, and some woman will give up on her hopes and dreams and settle for me.”

“Oh shut up.”

“No, it’s true. Our tepid love will sputter out in our cookie-cutter home in the suburbs, where we’ll raise our 2.3 kids and pretend that everything worked out for the best.”

The train jerked as it rounded a bend. His white-knuckle deathgrip on the handrail narrowly kept his hip from bumping the old woman to his rear.

After a brief silence, she replied.

“Well I’d say you’re being silly, but that actually sounds about right.”

Ouch.

M was talking about how computer-assisted art often ends up nicer than pieces made with traditional methods.

Me

but what about the simple elegance of painstakingly handcrafted ink-on-pulp that far outstrips the cold precision of dehumanizing technology in the ability to convey natural, organic emotion?

M

Are we role playing?

Am I you?

Me

i put on my robe and wizard hat…

M

I don’t want to be you.

Ouch.

Fabulous Feisty Fawn

Sorry I haven’t been posting here much lately. While things were busted for a bit I started using my mixi diary, and it became a little bit habit-forming. Not that it’s all that amazing technologically, it’s just that my audience in Japan tends to only have internet access on their cell phones, and so have a hard time reading any blogs that aren’t specifically tuned to be viewed on devices with small screens and expensive bandwidth.

I’m going to go HyperNerd™ on you guys for a sec, so bear with me.

Windows 98

When I arrived in Ikata, my office computer was a PII running Win98 on an ISDN line. (Note: For those of you who don’t speak Nerd, that means “bad”.) It was practically unusable.

I bitched to the right person, and sat back while important people were consulted, budgets were calculated, palms were greased, consensus was built, clocks ticked, paint dried, empires rose and fell, etc. In the end, the enchanted accounting fairies granted me one (1) computer, for external use only.

After a month of taking bids from vendors, then waiting for the machine to arrive, it was promptly placed on my desk and immediately ignored. For another month.

A typical Monday morning in the office

Repeatedly sighing (not-so)-under-my-breath, my frustration again reached the ears of my guardian angel, who dragged the IT troll out of his cave up to set up my machine and plug me into the World Wide Cybermation Superspaceway.

I was on my way to productivity when I noticed that he had locked down Windows so tight that I couldn’t actually do my job. He wouldn’t let me install applications, despite the fact that the standard tools of office slavery are completely irrelevant to what I do. I practically had to torture him to get the proxy info so I could test the English website in Firefox.

So what did I do? I promptly slapped Ubuntu Linux on the other partition and mentally flipped the IT troll a nice big bird. As hard as I could.

But all was not happy in the land of Edgy Eft. My computer was too new (imagine that!) for the video drivers to work properly, so Google Earth wouldn’t work. And I couldn’t even see the networked printers, much less print to them. Thus began several long months of dual-booting, switching to Windows every time I had to print.

Until today. Today I finally upgraded to Ubuntu 7.04, née Funky Fink Fresh Fosbury Flapping Fanny Feisty Fawn, and now Google Earth works and I can see the printers and after a bit of finagling the poorly-packaged Canon printer drivers (though your execution sucks, thank you for making Linux drivers), I can now print!

The moral of the story: I win IT.

Me doing what I do best

A mean, median, and mode sense of humor

I was talking with M today and made a funny. But really all I did was regurgitate a Simpsons quote, and I felt bad so I admitted so.

M

That’s ok. Humor isn’t about creativity. It’s about remembering lots of jokes and recycling them at appropriate times. And making sure you don’t tell the same one to the same person too many times.

Me

So really, humor is just data retention.

M

Yes. Statistically speaking, you should be hilarious.

That’s me: Statistically speaking, I should be hilarious.