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昨日の夜遅く、こんな件名の迷惑メールが僕の受信箱に届いた。

Honai in the mountains

Honai in the mountains

It’s a chore to get off my peninsula and onto the mainland. After wheezing my way up a mountain and through a tunnel, I found this view of the nearby town of Honai.

Honai is actually now a part of Yawatahama. They merged to save on administrative costs, just like practically every small town in Japan. This makes JET placements quite deceiving—you may be placed in “Yawatahama City,” but if that part of the city happens to be the former Honai, then you’re not really in the city at all; at best it’s a nearby suburb with all of the associated difficulties in transportation but without the yuppie feel.

I’m going to rant about TV for a bit now. I’ve complained about TV before on my blog, so let’s get the overlapping content out of the way: News shows.

Yesterday everyone was worried that typhoon 10 was going to hit the area; as a result, my plans to see the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie were canceled. It ended up being a bunch of nothing, as the typhoon swerved west into Kyūshū instead.

This morning I was watching the news when they switched to a weather update on the typhoon. You’d think they’d have some fancy on-screen graphics with nice, colorful icons and animations showing a map of Japan with an overlay of the typhoon and its course. Or, failing that, large, bright, crisp LCD displays showing the same. What did they show? Some guy’s PC monitor with Internet Explorer displaying an ugly version of weatherchannel.com. To illustrate his description of the weather, he clicked around, going from page to page. You are on TV telling us about the weather. We can assume, therefore, that you are a weather professional. At the very least, please maintain such an appearance.

Other things that enraged me: A news report about the recent popularity of completely unnecessary cosmetic surgery for kids. They didn’t say it in so many words, but basically 90% of the kids are forced into it by their idiotic, self-serving parents. They did mention that a strong trend in this is divorcees who want to make their child look less like their former spouse. I wanted to vomit, then throw the vomit in the face of the woman they interviewed who forced her perfectly acceptable-looking son to get a ridiculous operation to make his eyes look more Western.

There was something else too, but I forgot it.

My job is looking up—One of my superiors actually seems interested in having me translate the town website, so I’m slowly plodding through that. I’ve discovered that most of the people in my office are quite skilled in just looking busy, and any excuse I can find to talk to them is welcomed by a half hour of chitchat. Oh, the joys of government bureaucracy.

Hobo-tastic Journey, part 2

I have successfully avoided spending any more money in Wisconsin so far. In fact, cash-wise I’m actually ahead of the game–I managed to collect on some gas money owed to me under the “Gas, grass, or ass” policy I implemented concerning my car and the use thereof by persons other than me.

Saturday

9:30 AM

Wake up. Ramen for breakfast.

9:45 AM

Commiserate with friend’s roommate who also got ticketed coming to Madison. She was only doing 81; I win by 1 point.

10:00 AM

Wash dishes in exchange for free lodging.

11:20 AM

Waste time at Union South. Blog.

12:30 PM

Odors too musky again. Shower at the SERF.

1:30 PM

Waste time at Memorial Union. Blog. Realize my life is incredibly boring.

4:00 PM

Pick up M and go to R’s house for going-away party. Revert to child-like state of gleeful innocence playing with the little kids.

6:00 PM

Feast on fried pork cutlet (トンカツ tonkatsu), Japanese pancakes (お好み焼き okonomiyaki), some sort of Chinese dish, and etc. Enjoy scintillating conversation about the health benefits of citrus fruit.

11:00 PM

Drive M home. Return to R’s house to break out sleeping bag and crash on floor.

Hobo-tastic Journey

I drove from Minneapolis down to Madison yesterday, as I am sometimes wont to do, and as usual it was a mind-numbingly boring drive. Nothing screams “Wisconsin” like faceless prairie stretching as far as the eye can see.

When my mom does the drive it takes about 6 hours. When I drive it takes about 4, and this time I was punished for my expedience. A cop lurking in one of those obnoxious speed trap enclaves caught me going 82 MPH in a 65 zone, and gave me my first speeding ticket ever: $236.40. Ouch.

Therefore, to show my penitence to the great state of Wisconsin, I have decided that I will spend as little money as possible while here. So far I have spent:

• McDonald’s coffee (medium): $0.98
• 8 packs of Maruchan instant ramen: $1.38

Thus begins my Hobo-tastic Journey.

Here’s a rundown of the events so far:

Thursday

11:30-ish AM

Depart Minneapolis

1:33 PM

Ticketed by Officer W of Hixton, WI: “SPEEDING ON FREEWAY (16-19 MPH)”

4:00-ish PM

Arrive in Madison. Make a beeline to Copps to purchase ramen.

4:20-ish PM

Ditch car in University Houses area “visitor” parking space to avoid campus parking fees. Walk 2.5 miles to campus.

6:00-ish PM

Meet up with friend whose wedding I came to Madison to attend. Crash at his place.

6:30-ish PM

Ramen for dinner.

7:00-ish PM to 2:00-ish AM

Friend has an embarrassment of riches in the form of strawberry pies. We partake. And it was good.

Friday

8:00 AM

Wake up. Ramen for breakfast.

8:20 AM

Friend treats me to coffee at Einstein Bros. Bagels.

9:00 AM

Waste time at Union South.

10:30 AM

Musky odors become overpowering. Shower at the SERF, where my student ID inexplicably still works despite having graduated months ago. Dry self, shivering, with wall-mounted hair drier due to lack of towel.

11:30 AM

Relocate to Memorial Union so as to have better access to free water. Blog.

12:20 PM

Lunch on raw ramen noodles. Surprisingly tasty.

5:00 PM

Japanese conversation group. Apparently everyone thought I was either dead, or in Japan already.

6:30 PM

Tacos + movie at another friend’s house. Saw a Lupin the 3rd (ルパン三世) movie for the first time.

12:00 PM

Crash at yet another friend’s house. Watch a special theme episode of Walker: Texas Ranger in which Chuck Norris’s 19th century alter-ego battles his arch enemy’s 19th century alter-ego in parallel to their modern selves. Disappointingly, there were no roundhouse kicks.

More updates as the story unfolds.

Block E is dead to me

Block E is a block in downtown Minneapolis that started out as an empty lot or some equally useless waste of space, and ended up getting developed into the usual desperate-attempt-at-revitalizing-downtown corporate oasis of chain stores. You have to appreciate what they made of the place: It used to be an area filled with crazy drifters and riffraff; now it’s full of crazy drifters, riffraff, and classical music piped out to the sidewalk.

Happy hour at Gameworks, a movie, then happy hour at Applebee’s. That was the standard “Block-E-a-thon,” a former mainstay of any vacation prolonged enough to see my Minneapolis buddies. I say former because after last night, Block E is dead to me.

Gameworks was fine. The movie, while not great, was unobjectionable. And then there was Applebee’s… They supposedly have great happy hour deals: $1.50 taps, half price appetizers. And the have good beers on tap, too: Leinie’s Honey Weiss, Killian’s, and one of my favorites, Blue Moon. In fact they specifically advertise their happy hour as “featuring Blue Moon.” Sounds good, right?

Well after getting charged $4 for my $1.50 Blue Moon, I don’t think it’s a great deal. My friend talked to the manager and he told us some cock-and-bull story about “the Blue Moon button being blinky” and he refunded us the difference… incorrectly. He shorted me by $1 and my friend by $2.50. Point of advice: If you’re going to go so far as to apologize and refund someone’s money, please do it right. Oh wait, that’s only if you’re not trying to cheat people out of their money.

After that was settled we went to leave, expecting to pay $2 for 3 hours of parking with their standard movie + parking deal. Oh wait, suddenly and completely unadvertisedly, that deal is only valid if you only stay 3 hours or less. After 3 hours it shoots back up to regular price and we were boned to the tune of $8.

Sure it wasn’t a huge amount of money involved, but still, I don’t like being nickeled and dimed by crooked waiters or tricky policy loopholes. I won’t be going to Block E again.

You fail it

The following is an open letter to the UW-Madison food service department.

To whom it may concern:

Please instruct your employees to refrain from attending work while stoned. Also, I’d like a refund on the coffee that should have been in my capuccino but Craig was too blitzed to remember.

Sincerely,
amake

Restaurant review: Takara

There are two prominent Japanese restaurants on State St., Madison, WI. One is Wasabi. It is very good. The other is Takara, which as I confirmed for the umpteenth time today, is very bad.

I’ve boiled down my experience into a couple points of advice for the management at Takara:



• Playing awful 70′s bubblegum high-pitched Japanese music does not make you a Japanese restaurant.




• In order for you to be a Japanese restaurant, you must serve Japanese food. On that note, I regret to inform you that none of the following ingredients belong in katsudon:
  • pea pods
  • mushrooms
  • takuan
  • carrots

  


  On the plus side, your sushi was passable. Not good, but passable.

• It’s not a requirement, but it would help if you had even one Japanese employee.
• If you want more than a 5% tip, please get less surly waitresses.




I give Takara 0.3 thumbs up. Better luck next time.

The soormentic wheeb

One of my least crappy classes is about the internet. Whoo, look at that! The intarweb! I’m gonna gigabyte myself an HTML of Google!

As stupid as such a class might sound, it has introduced me to another aspect of the “metadata everywhere” boom that actually started around 1996 but no one cared until MP3s needed tags and Spotlight put resource forks to good use again. I consider myself a pretty well-informed individual, but things like RDF, FOAF, Dublin Core, etc. still have me pretty confused. I’m trying to understand what good the semantic web is, and the best explanation I’ve found so far is, courtesy of an AC on Slashdot in a post entitled The semantic web, in a nutshell:

1. People like to masturbate.
2. Some people like to look at pictures of naked girls while masturbating.
3. Some people like to think about graph theory while masturbating.

The semantic web is the unfortunate result of #3.

In other words, I have no idea. Take a look at the best-looking RDF browser I’ve been able to find, Welkin. Now you see what the AC was talking about. The semantic web means about as much to me as the soormentic wheeb. Pretty much the only writings I’ve managed to find about it pooh-pooh it as a bunch of nonsense. Clearly these meta-utopia eggheads are in need of a good info-ninja attack.

But far be it for me to ignore another web trend standard. I’ve thus used the FOAF-a-Matic to create my PersonalProfileDocument. I have no idea what good this will do me, but here’s hoping.

If you have no idea what I’m babbling on about and just need something to laugh at, remember that you can do anything at Zombo.com. Anything at all.

I hate Keio more than ever

You’d think last time would have numbed me up enough to handle this round, but no. Here, in a nutshell, is the shit they pulled on us this time:

Student, fearing the worst, makes sure to ask

Student

Can I take this class?

Secretary

Yes.

Voice mail received the next day

Secretary

You can’t take that class.

The day after that

Student

Why can’t I take this class?

Secretary

It’s against the rules.

Student

What rules? You said the other day I could take it.

Secretary

Maybe you can. I’ll tell you tomorrow.

I want to kill these people. It is the most disorganized, unnecessarily complicated, seizure-inducing system I’ve ever encountered. And this is the best Japan has to offer.

An open letter to Northwest Airlines

To whom it may concern:

I rode your roundtrip service from Tokyo to Beijing recently, and I have two bones to pick with you.

1. While I enjoy your in-seat entertainment system, I wish I could turn off the monitor during the initial ascent. We are a captive audience, but that doesn’t mean you should be able to force paying customers to sit through ads for products and services that they have no interest in.

2. On the flight back from Beijing, I happened to sit next to a middle-aged Japanese woman. When the food service cart came by, we found that the flight attendant spoke only English, and could only offer the unhelpful description “pork or omelette.” The woman could not speak any English, and so was unable to communicate that she could not eat meat. Had I not been there to translate, at the very least there could have been a wasted meal, or at worst we might have needed a doctor.

   Later in the flight, the beverage service came by and the woman asked for water, in Japanese of course. Again, the flight attendant didn’t understand, so I translated. After this second encounter, the attendant said to the woman, knowing that she wouldn’t understand, “You should really learn some English.” While the flight attendant’s tone was not snide or sarcastic, I still feel that this was completely out of line. If your company flies to Japan, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the flight attendants to know at least minimal Japanese, like “water.” And it’s not like this woman just came back from an English-speaking country, where one might expect her to know some English.

   The flight attendant in question was having a hard time communicating with all of the non-English speakers on the flight, be they Chinese or Japanese. She was probably tired and frustrated, which is understandable. But it is completely unacceptable to blame the customer for not speaking a foreign language. I wouldn’t be surprised if the woman was quite put off by the service on that flight; I think you’d be lucky to have her as a customer again.

Thank you for your time.

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