the quesadilla thrilla

Whosoever shall be found

2009-10-09T17:44:00.000-07:00

After putting this together my copy of Ableton became self-aware and knew first that it was not properly bought, and went on to shut itself down. So unless I can find a way to justify purchasing a new copy (at $500, believe me I've tried but it doesn't look to be happening for a long time) this will be it. For Ever! Meh

1) Level 42 - Something About You
2) Phoenix - Lisztomania (Alex Metric Remix)
3) Passion Pit - To Kingdom Come (Grum Remix)
4) Riton and Primary 1 - Who's There
5) Redman - I Hold The Crown (His Majesty Andre Remix)
6) Amanda Blank - Might Like You Better
7) Man With Guitar - Man With Guitar (dunno - the guy's name is Stuart Price)
8) ZZT - The Worm
9) Fake Blood - mars
10) Renaissance Man - What Is Guru (Riva Starr Remix)
11) Michael Jackson - Thriller (Louis La Roche Remix)
12) Acid Girls - The Numbers Song
13) Riton and Primary 1 - Who's There (Style of Eye Remix)
14) Tommy Sparks - Miracle (Grum Remix)

blink

That last one was utter shit, by the way. I hope everyone's forgotten it

Footsies and Tootsies

2009-06-20T00:12:00.000-07:00

I crapped this one out kind of fast, so be kind.

1 - Mini Viva - I left my heart in Tokyo (Acid Girls Remix)
2 - Dirty Vegas - Days Go By
3 - Mowgli - Pa Po Pon (Nat Self Remix)
4 - Busta Rhymes - Dangerous (Flight Facilities Remix)
5 - Nelly Furtado ft. Timbaland - Promiscuous Girl (Heil Instamash by Luminfire)
6 - Nelly Furtado ft. Timbaland - Promiscuous Girl (Axwell Remix)
7 - Redman - I Hold the Crown (His Majesty Andre Remix)
8 - ZZT - The Worm
9 - Boys Noize - Starter
10 - Toddla T and Herve - Shake It
11 - The Phantom's Revenge - Absolute Ego Riot (Louis LaRoche Remix)
12 - Alphabeat - What Is Happening

The Worm is really bass-heavy and will probably sound weird unless you're well equipped for it. It sounded great in my headphones.

Linky: http://www.zshare.net/audio/6161593998ae87c1/

I think they know they're lying

2009-04-26T17:52:00.001-07:00

I've heard it said many times that the economic crisis is based on the lack of confidence in the economy, that if people would start believing that the future was secure enough to spend more and save less the economy would be set back on its right course and their future would be, indeed, secure once again.

I don't think this works. Money isn't valued by the gold standard anymore, or whatever the term is that means it no longer represents a certain amount of gold/silver/whatever, but you can't say that it only has what value we think it does. I think that if you were to strip away the financial wizardry and accounting trickery, there has to be some link to human capital, and a step farther the output possibility of the earth itself.

At the most generic, the market exchanges goods and services. People must be well-fed enough to have time to make good or devise services, the goods must be made from something, and indeed the society in which the good makers and service providers must be more productive per citizen to allow for them to have the ability to do so. If you put money in a bank, the bank loans that money out to someone to build a superconductingsupercollider, the builders and schemers must be fed and raw materials must be extracted and derived.

The bank didn't create that wealth, it just moved money around as other people actually did. The idea that if we just start spending money again everyone will get jobs and be comfortable doesn't work. At any given time there is an absolute, and I suspect quantifiable, amount of wealth available to humanity. The bursting of the Big Bubble wasn't due to decreasing confidence, it was due to people's overconfidence meeting tragically with the outer limit of our collective means. The slump we're in now is a correction; our perceived value is sliding back to a level closer to our real value.

This idea has been rolling around in my idea for a while, and I almost can't believe this hasn't been thought of and proven yet. I'm almost certain that I'm right, which if true means that we are in major trouble if we don't get on track to more sustainable ways of taking our livelihood out of the earth. Given humanity's history of dealing with crises (thanks to firefox's spellcheck for teaching me the plural of crisis, by the way) before they hit, I'm not confident that this will happen.

Things they don't tell you about Japan

2009-03-22T18:58:00.001-07:00

I talked to people who had been there before me and I read a fair bit, but there were still a few things I wasn't prepared for that I saw at every corner. First, Japanese people walk slow. Also, all the cats have short tails. In the 15 months I spent there, I saw maybe three cats with full-length tails. Maybe because they were strays and got them eaten off by other cats or something.

Here's some pictures taken out of a book I found. The French impressionist movement was inspired in part by the Japense Ukiyoe (浮世絵) - pictures of the floating world. In every Japanese culture or art class I took, they would tell that the floating world is the red light and entertainment districts of pre-meiji Japan, but then go on to show lots of pictures of landscapes and scenes of townspeople doing whatever they do. Sometimes there'd be a lady putting on makeup or something, and there are some famous pictures of Kabuki actors, but other than the brief mention of the red lights there'd be nary a trace of them after the first introduction.

I found a book of 艶色浮世絵. I'm not sure exactly what 艶色 means, but the first character means lustrous or shiny, and the second one means color. If you get the first character and stick a 然 on it it becomes 艶然, which means seductive. So I guess 艶色 means either shiny colors or sexy colors. From this book, though, the meaning becomes clear. This book is a collection (or part of a collection, rather. It's book 4 in its series) With your kind permission, I humbly present to you the highlights.

We'll start off as tame as it gets. There are a lot of these in the book, just different outfits and faces. I think this guy went to the B. Dooley school of lovemaking. I'm not sure if anyone reads this blog that will get the reference.

And who doesn't love a little lesbian porn? But what's that they're reading?

Aha! They have a book of 艶色浮世絵! This picture makes me feel really connected with history. They might be looking at a picture that I have in my own book!

This couple is illuminated by a lamp in the corner of the picture. The look on the guy's face carries a sense of regret with a hint of boredom and resignation. Maybe he's wishing he could afford a hotter prostitute. Or maybe he just realized he left his keys in the car.

Here's a closeup. This was from a different picture - they printed one version and then stuck some darkness over the top of it to make a new version. These are woodblock prints, so modifications like that would be quite easy.

This guy appears to have snuck up on his lady while she was doing laundry. Check out the writing.

Writing itself is considered an art form. Almost all of the pictures in this book have calligraphy as well as the people themselves. From what I've seen of Japanese calligraphy the more illegible the more beautiful it is deemed, and it's taken to the point that even native Japanese can have a hard time reading it without a lot of experience. The editors of this collection have been kind enough to transcribe some of it for the reader. Usually it sets up the scene a bit and then gets in to the dialogue. This one is pretty creepy. I'm sure someone else could translate it better than I, but what follows is good enough for now.

Man: "How is that? Is it good? [he used katakana there for those of you who speak Japanese] Today's really good for me, too. The taste has become especially better since the time of 新鉢 [new bowl?? no idea, but probably dirty]. It's like it's sucking me in. That's a good taste. I've got no other wishes than to live the rest of my life with this kind of feeling.

Woman: "Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, I'm going to pass out. It's a feeling that is better not to stop. It's outrageous. Why is it like this?"

Some of the pictures get quite heavy with the otomatopoeia. Very fun, though judgements as to how classy it may be I'll leave to the reader.

This one appears to be mentally composing his shopping list. Do I need to get more milk...?

A pirate! Wait, a foreigner! He is, according to the caption, a "brown southern barbarian wearing a captain's hat."

And this couple appears to have an audience. I'm pretty sure that's a screen to the left of them, but only a sadist would paint a creepy old guy watching a room that was going to be occupied by naked people.

Here's a guy in the high roller suite.

And here's a couple watching TV

Here's another lady with an audience.

And here's a couple also using a tool. Interesting that even in 1802, the year this picture was made, people preferred their dildos big and black.

This one is a pretty straightforward picture, but I just want to direct the readers to compare the size of his dong to the size of his dome.

There you have it! A selection of Japanese art from the early 1800's.

Goodnight

Quick thought

2009-03-19T20:09:00.000-07:00

People are poop-flinging blame at the current administration for allowing the AIG bonuses. They got money from the Bailout, right? The bailout that was given during the Bush administration, right? The one that explicitly said that once given it was subject to no revisions, oversight, etc etc etc, right? The one that was given out long before Obama and co. took office, right?

I don't want to be thought of as an Obama fanboy (though I am), but this is another instance that I feel like everyone else is missing something. Am I crazy? Bailout passed in October, Obama took office in January. Is our collective desire to forget the Bush administration so strong that we're adjusting the timeline already?

1800's Japanese porno coming up whenever inclination and opportunity coincide. I also got a new copy of Ableton so I am farting together a new 35 minute mixy thing whenever I find enough good songs to put together

I simply can't believe

2009-03-06T21:47:00.001-08:00

That the google search terms "kanye west turdburglar" yields no exact hits.

In which God shits all over my weekend plans and I discover that my ancestors hate smiling

2009-03-03T19:07:00.000-08:00

I was all set to visit some friends in Columbia, when I got the news that my grandparents' home had been torn up by a tornado. It wasn't as bad as it could have been; there was a substantial piece of their roof missing and all the windows had been blown out. Lots of water damage in the house and debris in the yard. Their garden shed was facing the wrong way and the wind had blown the corrugated metal structure up in to the trees. An awesome sight. The craziest thing was that the second day I was there helping to clean up, my grandparents got a phone call from someone from a town about a 45 minute drive away from their home, saying that they found a picture of them in their yard. After the storm tore off their roof, it picked up one of their old family photos and carried it 30 miles away.

My grandparents were lucky compared to some others. Just two houses down, there was a giant pile of rubble where once there was a house. The people who had lived there only survived because they had retreated to a storm shelter. Walking around the neighborhood I saw an I-beam that had been bent at a 30-degree angle and thrown to the side of the street from a house that used to stand some 50 feet back. The town's only school (this is super rural Oklahoma) was ripped in half by the storm. There was a pecan orchard that had around 85% of its trees destroyed. Nut trees generally take 30 years or more to start fruiting, so the lady who owned it has had a large part of her income irrevocably ended.

Quite sad, but compared to the 15 or so people who died in a town just 5 miles up the road, even these people were better off than some.

My mom and I stayed at the house of a relative who was described as my cousin, twice removed. It took me a while to realize that this meant she was my grandmother's cousin. This lady is big in to genealogy and tracked that side of my family back to Germany by way of New Orleans. In her house she kept our family's pictures up in a hall of portraits. I learned that my grandmother was a smoking hottie back in her day and that my grandfather was a snappy dresser, though his ears make him look like a big galoot. I took pictures of the oldest pictures.

The first thing I noticed was that my ancestors were not big in to smiling. I realize that pictures took a while to take in those days and that maintaining a smile would be hard (I myself can't hold one for the five seconds it might take even now), but generally these people can't even hold a neutral face. This is Elizabetha Margareta Radmacher, who bears in my mind a striking resemblance to the woman in Grant Wood's American Gothic. Here is a face that says "We do not tolerate laughing in this house. Now finish chopping wood so your father can finish your daily beating before it's time for church."

Here is Louis Stahler and Margarete Elizabeth Offenstein. It's a bit hard to tell from the picture I took, but only Margarete is actually photographed. Louis appears to be penciled in afterwards. I can only guess that he died before they took the picture of his wife and they had to draw a portrait of his ghost. Margarete looks like she doesn't believe the picture will work.

This character is Samuel Sanders Jr. It'd be understandable to think that he was involved with the lovely Elizabetha Radmacher, but in fact he wasn't. It'd be easy to see them together, though. The frown on his face looks like it's been chiseled there since he was 4 years old. This is the face of a man who would tell you to shoot Old Yeller and then burn all of your favorite toys after you catch a cold.

This happy couple is Peter Oliver Sanders and Elizabeth Margaret Stahler. I particularly like the pose they've taken for this picture. It was on quite a few of the old portraits in the hall. I think it was supposed to suggest a supportive and loving wife in an era/area when body contact beyond a handshake would be pornographic, but to me this calls to mind a young jedi and his evil master standing behind him with hand on shoulder.

Lucinda Harrolle and William George Washington Sanders. Lucinda had it together and looked straight at the camera, but William got mixed up and stared fixedly at a tree in the background.

Samuel Sanders III and Elizabeth Gillespie. I have no idea why there should be so many Elizabeths in my family. It continues even through my generation with my older sister Sarah Elizabeth. According to babynames.com it means "God is my Oath," which seems not just a lot to squeeze in to a name but also a pretty somber message to saddle some poor baby girl with.

That's all the pictures I took. Now that I've been accepted in to a graduate program and I don't feel so paranoid about my online life damaging my future prospects I can go ahead and post up some pictures from a book of 1800's Japanese porn that I found in a used bookstore in Osaka.

Until next time

A book suggestion

2009-02-27T05:54:00.000-08:00

"The man behind the wheel weighed, at a rough guess, twenty-two stone and appeared to be wearing a vehicle several sizes too small. Massive hairy arms protruded from a dirty singlet like legs of mutton through a slit in a wetsuit. The enormous gut landslided between the driver's legs like a ten-kilo bag of sagging wet shit and conveniently eclipsed any view Dean had of the wheel. The steering wheel in question nestled firmly between the driver's ample thighs, happy as a Frisbee in a waterbed and gripped by Bratwurst fingers. It resembled a bread and butter plate being stress-tested by a Sumo wrestler."

from "And Even the Rats Clapped" by David Argue. Excerpt describing a taxi driver

Things in my head

2009-02-24T19:36:00.001-08:00

Million dollar idea: Scamp Camp! From Goofus to Gallant in six weeks. We take your little rapscallions and work some discipline into them. Activities include 4:00 reveille, breaking large rocks in to smaller ones, being put in small boxes, and crafts.

I am a superhero. My powers include correctly identifying cats as boy or girl based on their face, walking on ice without slipping, and forming regular-sized pieces of soap from small fragments.

Hand jobs, nose jobs

2009-01-06T21:35:00.000-08:00

I watched a program on the National Geographic channel about the Hubble telescope, on which they mentioned that the supernova that led to the Crab Nebula was recorded by Chinese astronomers at around 1000 AD. The only other recorded one I'm aware of (with not even the minimal Google searching to find exceptions) is the one that occurred around 0 AD making the Star of Bethlehem. They sound pretty awesome, and going by this every-1000-years estimation it seems not unlikely that I'll get to see one in my lifetime. I sure hope so.

Item 2: On Health Care.
Everybody knows that preventative health care is cheaper and more effective than treatment of disorders allowed to come to the point of crisis. Everyone also knows that the USA's health care system needs some major revamping if it's not going to drag the country in to bankruptcy. There has to be some method of health care that improves the rate of regular checkups for preventative care, especially among the aging baby boomers. In "Predictably Irrational," the author devotes a section to procrastination, mentioning an experiment he performed that gave three groups of students due dates for four papers over the course of a semester that were either outwardly dictated (by the professor) to be evenly spaced over the course of the semester, outwardly dictated to be all due at the end of the semester, or freely decided but binding and enforced by grade penalties for each day late. The students who decided their own dates did fine, the ones who could turn in at any day up until the last day of the semester did worse, and the ones with the due dates dictated to be evenly spaced did the best. In other words, those who were given the freedom to procrastinate on all their papers ended up doing so and were eventually graded worse than those with due dates decided by their benevolent dictator.

You can apply this message to preventative health care. Checkups are a hassle, but perhaps if they were mandatory then people would take care of them with more regularity than if we were given the freedom to put them off indefinitely. Therefore, I propose a national health plan that one can opt in or out of, but imposes regular checkups on its members with a monetary penalty for failure to make them on time.

Supporting this, but requiring too much typing for me to summarize here to my satisfaction, is the work of this guy, who finds that people are indeed happier by means of a "psychological immune system" when terrible things happen to us beyond our control. Granted, in his book he finds that we are more unhappy about small irritations, which checkups might turn out to be, than world-shaking tragedies, but I think the line I'm thinking in is clear. Just as business and the financial markets need some regulation, people's habits might need some too.

Somewhere in my legions of readers there'll probably be someone of influence in the house of Obama to get this thing moving.

Election, self-reflection

2008-10-29T21:04:00.000-07:00

I was reading a transcript of the Larry King interview with John McCain, and something occurred to me when McCain made the comment that the last president to win the election while still losing Ohio was John Kennedy. He was saying it in a way that was justifying his heavy campaigning there, but I kind of wonder if he is misunderstanding the role that the swing states play. It occurred to me that there might not really be a connection between how much time and money is spent in a particular state and how many popular votes one receives, that instead it might be that the reason that you can't win an election without winning Ohio is because Ohio reflects the national mood. Obama is apparently wiping the floor with McCain right now, and even Texas is not guaranteed to go Republican now. If I'm right then Obama will win Ohio just as he's winning all those other states, whether or not he's spent a lot of time there. I say this while knowing that the candidate with the most money almost always wins the election, and since Obama has enough money to make a Scrooge McDuck style silo of gold coins to swim in the fact that he's winning might be merely a reflection of the money he's got to spend. But I think that all the money he's getting is another reflection of the national mood, that so many people want him to win that lots of people are giving him a lot.

We forget almost everything that we experience, and commuicate or record even less than what we remember, so I think everything is a lot more mixed up than we like to admit. It makes me really bad at arguments since I have a hard time convincing myself that I'm absolutely right and spend most of my time trying to convince the other guy that they aren't as right as they think they are. Considering that, and that I freely admit that I don't follow election statistics as closely as those who are paid to do so, I will freely admit and actually suspect that I am probably missing something very obvious here. But at the same time as I say that, I can't help but think that while I might be completely wrong, the people running the election might be going about their job in the wrong way.

The above paragraphs are a fine example of writing that I wish to stop. When I write naturally I throw in a lot of "I"s and "me"s. I'm not sure if it's because so much of my writing lately is for cover letters and purpose statements for jobs and graduate school applications, respectively, or updating people on my life through emails, or writing things out to smooth out my internal monologue from a nebulous cloud of vaguely connected ideas to something more solid. I'd like to think that it's a reflection of the constant knowledge that what I experience is a tiny slice of reality and therefore subject to misjudgement and an inexact memory. As I mentioned above, I'm aware that nobody has a monopoly on the truth, and I think that my nonvariance from the first person is a result of the knowledge that everything I think I know is eventually subjective. Even if something is laid out in a boring black-and-white line graph, the source of the data, the organization's intent in collecting it, and the methods of data collection all have to be considered along with it. A truly comprehensive collection and consideration of all the variables involved in any set of data or opinion can never be assembled, and knowing this I feel compelled to throw in lots of qualifiers to any statement I make.

It's kind of a positive spin, and viewed in this light I think it makes my writing more solid than others', but I am also aware that it makes me seem self-interested and self-doubting. I can't help but wonder if it discourages people from reading anything I write to completion. If I read something I want it to be something relating to me, after all, and someone reading my writing gets constant reminders that it's not about them. I'm not sure how to fix it without ignoring the little voice that tells me that I shouldn't make unqualified statements of fact when nobody knows the unqualified truth. If anybody knows the unqualified truth, then do let me know.

Science and shit

2008-09-14T02:46:00.000-07:00

Teaching English to preschoolers and hanging around with non-native speakers has taught me to examine my own language use. I’ve realized that I have two really bad habits. I slur my words together so that the final sound in one word tends to sneak into the beginning of a word that begins with vowel, for example “I’m going out” turns in to “I’m goin gout.” If there’s a hard sound, I tend to drop it. I want to be more precise, but actively thinking about what I’m saying makes me 1) sound unnatural and English Teachery, and 2) probably more restrained in what I say since it slows me down and forces me to think about what I’m about to say. I can’t figure out why exactly speaking more clearly and thinking about what I’m going to say is a a bad thing, but for some reason it turns me off.

The second habit is that I use far more profanity than is usually called for. I’m sure there are more words that I can use for emphasis than “very” and “fucking,” and I intend to find out what they are.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the way I speak because I suspect it will be a big factor in my upcoming interview for a teaching job with Nova, the once-giant, then fallen, and now rising up again English teaching giant of Japan. It’s a job that is mostly to help me stay with my fiancee until finally her American visa is approved and we can live happily ever after in suburbian USA, but while I’ve been looking for jobs in Japan for the meantime I’ve also been firing apps all over the globe for something that lets me use my science background but outside of the lab. I discovered that lab work is tedious and shitty and boring, and after years of experience I can’t help but think that the only reason undergraduates are allowed to work in them is because the robots to do the work are too expensive or haven’t been made yet. Anyway, I don’t want to work in a lab anymore, and between actually applying for jobs and continuing my Japanese studies, I have been quietly imagining what it might be like to actually be interviewed for one of the jobs that I actually want.

That leads me to more science. I am an extremely lazy person, so if I was someone hiring for the positions that I want, I would probably ask a couple of throwaway/character analysis questions like “what do you see as the future of medicine,” or something like that. Judging by my progress thusfar, I don’t have much of a chance of getting these jobs, so I am going to share my secret answers with you.

Just so you know, I’m applying mostly in the world of information retrieval for big databases and stuff that make papers accessible for smarter people than me.

It’s going to go very, very fast. Education inflation (a painful subject for me, I kind of resent that I can’t get a job with a supermajor like biochemistry and wish that someone had told me early on that I really need to add an -engineering suffix to my major to be in demand) means that people are going in to the job force with a lot of knowledge. Lots of these people are crossover computer-whatever people who are going to harness increasingly intelligent, untiring, and independent computers to do the “grunt thinking” (like taking raw data and churning it through some of the easier but time-intensive calculations for the most obvious conclusions) for them.

There are two technologies to watch over the next 10-15 years, long enough to make a real difference but far enough that the business-educated folks can’t touch them just yet. There’s Dr. Craig Ventner, a guy who has a kind of weird place in my respectometer for kind of stealing half of the data from the government-financed Human Genome Project and setting up his own company to start working on sequencing lots and lots of different creatures’ genomes. He’s since then done a lot of amazing things, the biggest and most exciting one being that of making significant steps on making customized life. Still in its early phases, it will before too long result in cells that people can build with their own experiments in mind. People doing proteomics or genomics or toxicology or the laaaaarge majority of life science will be able to reduce all of the nasty side-effecting stuff out of their cells and work one piece at a time to give them more predictable and stable systems. Not Real Live Cells, but though you can’t quite call it in vivo I think it will merit a new Latin phrase’s introduction into the common academic lexicon. In synthetica I guess. I don’t know Latin, but that feels right. His work also will lead to easy-to-control bioremediators with off switches. Good for the environment for several reasons.

There’s also some other guys, whose names I don’t know and the source for which I don’t care to google right now, who have just gotten diabetic mice to switch some of their cells to insulin-producing ones. This will, eventually, spread out to incredible tools for non-infectious diseases (diabetes for example) that will, I guarantee you, freak out the pharmacy industry like nothing else has. This means that the pharma guys are going to have to watch reeeeeally carefully what happens to the group of scientists who have done this and those who are influenced by them, and either buy them up really fast or work superdoubletime to catch up. It also means they are going to have to find a way to make the currently less-profitable but more prevalent diseases profitable.

And that brings me to the less-profitable but more prevalent diseases. I saw on one of the TED talks a speech by a guy who was promoting fairly traditional control measures against malaria. Malaria is spread by mosquitos, and in its more virulent form leaves you sick and bedridden for quite a while before it finishes you off. Thinking from the eye of the disease, he realized that the form it takes hijacks the bedridden state by making the victims vulnerable to mosquitos biting the immobile patient, then the mosquitos spread it around more. The disease LOVES people when they’re sick. But if you can keep mosquitos from biting people in bed, by putting some nets around the places where people sleep, the strains that keep people in bed won’t be as successful in reproducing. Put some nets around, and the strains that don’t make you so nasty, that let you move around freely without severe symptoms, are more successful. By keeping the poor saps that are super sick from being bitten, they promote the less deadly strains of the virus. Disease not cured, but god damn if that isn’t an improvement. He did something similar with diarrhea in South America.

So there you have it. Anybody want to hire me?

My crappy computer crapped out on me

2008-08-01T17:48:00.000-07:00

Which means I lost alllll my old papers, all my music, all my software, and my computer back home crapped out at the same time and my backup CDs for the software are all in America. I got my lappy fixed (in one day - here's a well-earned shout out to Shinsaibashi's Apple store) but it is a hollow shell of the amazing machine it once was. I'm in the process of trying to get back what I once had, but the heartbreak was great and I don't think I will ever love a computer again.

What I've been doing since the tragedy -

Using my fiancee's computer. I was just getting used to all the weird key placements and now I have to re-train my muscle memory so I don't have to look at the keyboard for the punctuation keys.

Looking for jobs! I really want to find something that calls for a scientific background without being a lab tech. I'd really like something in writing, and I've seen some very juicy-looking ones that call for translating academic language into something more accessible. However all these writing jobs need sample writing, and though I was a "science correspondant" for a student newspaper, I've lost all of my articles that I wrote for them with the hard drive failure of my old computer in America. Bad luck for sure.

Working at the preschool. I wrangle kids and try to keep them from fighting each other while hoping that they pick up English when I speak it at them. Frequently when I ask them a question, they just stare back up at me with the biggest, cutest eyes in the world with a face that tells me they either didn't understand a word or are too scared of me to answer. One of the kids' dads is the Japanese sales representative for Independent Fabrications and he said he'd let me on one of the demo bikes, which is exciting.

Today, though, I've been doing none of those things. Everything has taken a side seat to figuring out who left me this mystery message on my phone last night. What a mystery! I have no idea whose number it is, though it's a Japanese cell phone number, and don't recognize the voice at all. Japanese phones have a nifty infra-red thing that makes exchanging information effortless so I am almost certain that everyone I've given my number to has given me theirs in turn. The caller addresses me by my first name, and then tells me to answer the phone in a slightly disappointed, slightly aggrieved tone, as if we had agreed to get in touch at that time (about 1:00 am here) and I failed to be there for him. It's a guy, it's an American, and he knows me and my phone number. Who is it!?! I called the number back after listening to the message a few more times, but it was 5:30 in the morning at that time (living with Keiko means I keep kind pretty much the same hours as her) and I got no answer.

Mystery man, if you're reading this, reveal yourself! Also, sorry for calling you at 5:30 in the morning. You were probably sleeping, and if you're like me you turned off the ringer and went back to sleep without waking up.

What up, Elijah Wood?

2008-06-24T05:52:00.001-07:00

I've been looking for a job for a while now, and at the same time finding less about Japan that I like. Noh is boring, Jpop is worth little beyond kitsch value, and the shrinking population and economic troubles they foretell paint a bleak picture of Japan's future. Mostly what I don't like is how nobody wants to hire me, so I will be going back to America. I'll be sad to leave the takoyaki and the trains, but very happy because I will be bringing my lovely girlfriend with me! Several of the other students here have already or will have to endure a prolonged separation from their significant others, and I thankfully will be spared it.

This one's not finished but I sent it to some friends, so for the other friends I will put it up here.

1 - Best Fwends - M.Y.S.E.L.F (Spank Rock Remix)
2 - Pase Rock - Sexy Motherfucker ft. Amanda Blank (Nate Day Remix)
3 - Hail Social - No Paradise (Hot Pink DeLorean Remix)
4 - Hot Chip - Ready for the Floor (L.A. Riots and Villains Remix)
5 - Cirez D. - Knockout
6 - Jamelia - Something About You (Crookers Crunky Remix)
7 - J-Kwon - Tipsy (Radio Slave Remix)
8 - Soulwax - Miserable Girl (Shinichi Osawa re-edit)
9 - Dragonette - Competition (Ocelot Remix)
10 - Rod Stewart - Do Ya Think I'm Sexy

enjoy please

1, 2, 3, 4

2008-02-04T01:47:00.000-08:00

It gets a bit silly with the LCD/Technotronic/Bonde transition, but this might be one of my favorites. It's also the first time I've put something together without any Daft Punk.

linky

Chemical Bros – Star Guitar
Chemical Bros – Star Guitar (Shinichi Osawa rework ft. Au Revoir Simone)
Positive K – I Got A Man
St. Germain – Alabama Blues (Todd Edwards Vocal Remix)
Seal – Amazing (Kaskade Remix)
Justin Timberlake – My Love (XXXChange Remix)
Supercar – Wonder Word
LCD Soundsystem – Get Innocuous (Soulwax Remix)
Technotronic – Pump Up The Jam (Chopped by me)
Bonde do Role – Office Boy (Brodisnki Remix)
DatA – Aerius Light
Feist – 1, 2, 3, 4 (My!Gay!Husband! Get Up Kid Edit)
Digitalism – Pogo (Shinichi Osawa Remix)

What happens in Bangkok

2008-01-31T21:26:00.000-08:00

A cool thing about Thailand is that you can haggle for almost everything. You get quoted a crazy high price because you're foreign and have no idea how much their monopoly money is worth, but you can talk them down at least a few dollars on something that costs no more than a few dollars in the first place. You get better at it the more you do it, too. I started out getting three dollars off a linen shirt, upgraded to a pair of diesel jeans for $30 from $37, and finally as the jewel in my haggling crown talked a guy down $20 per ticket on the ping pong show.

It started by asking the gentleman at the door if he could bring the price of 800 Baht down a bit, then taking his offer and pushing it a bit more with a "I was hoping more like this price" and punching numbers on his calculator. He gave a final offer of 1200 Baht for two people including a drink ticket. We weren't drinking and asked if he could let it go for a thousand, which he couldn't. I apologized for wasting his time and turned around to leave, and after two steps back towards the tuk tuks he acquiesced. Ping pong show for roughly $14 each. Awesome.

I was a little disappointed at first as there was just a girl dancing around on a stage with black undies and bra on, and though it got a little more interesting as she took them off, nothing more happened for a minute. Just as I was wondering if I'd been had, the girl reached down and pulled 30 feet of fluorescent ribbon out of her hoo-ha, waved it around like an olympic ribbon dancer, and then tied a cat's cradle on the five poles she was supplied with while the end of the ribbon still hidden somewhere inside her.

After this came the coke bottle colonic, starting with water and coming back out roughly the color of coca cola, appropriately enough, back in to the bottle from whence the formerly clear liquid came. As she exited the stage she gave one of the guys a cheers and clinked her bottle against his beer. Then came a lady extracting a daisy chain of jingle bells from her secret spot, the one pulling out a string of razor blades and then cutting stuff with them to show that they were still sharp after their journey into the unknown.

All the girls started out like the first one, dancing around in underwear which was eventually removed and tossed to the stage. The ping pong lady was by far the best actual dancer, even after she fit 7 of them inside her before squirting them back out one by one, cradling them between her knees, and then dropping them back in the jar like an endangered sea turtle shitting its eggs into a lovingly prepared nest. She dropped a couple of them on the floor, picked one up and popped it right back in before dropping it again as she danced around the stage a bit. 7 was the maximum number she had in at any point, but even though she had more available I can't imagine that she could get much more since they all came out pretty dented from the crowding of her womb.

The quief artists were impressive. There was one who did some kind of reverse one to smoke cigarettes (side note - cigarette boxes in Thailand accompany their surgeon general's warning with actual pictures of blackened lungs and rotting teeth printed on the boxes, but don't show a single cancerous womb). The best one was definitely the banana lady. With an audible pop, this lady fired a banana five feet into the air, caught it, and then reloaded twice before one shot went astray and her banana went too far for her to catch it and it bounced off the stage. She tried to get the audience people to hand it back up to her but nobody seemed to want to touch it.

I see that I'm leaving out the brief lesbian act (to the tune of "I will always love you") where they mimed every position from behind I had ever heard of and a few that I never thought of, and the time when they calmed the soundtrack down from DJ Sammy's version of "heaven" to that James Blunt song "You're Beatiful" for an actual-insertion love scene between an underweight hexagenerian man and a 20-something lady. I'm leaving out that the crowd was about half couples and young folks clearly there for the spectacle and half skeezy businessmen who seemed genuinely in to it. I'm leaving out that my trip to Thailand was a lot more about raft-hotels, spicy curry, cave temples, swimming with elephants, and petting tigers (not a euphemism) with orange-robed monks. All of this was amazing, and all of it will stay in my memory forever, but the thing that will stand out for me is when I became for one moment Charlie, Master Bargainer, witnessed firsthand how many amazing things the vulva is capable of, and discovered how easy it is to wipe all other memories you have attached to a song with the fabled shows in Bangkok's Pat Pong.

mmmbop

2007-12-19T05:05:00.000-08:00

Daft Punk was awesome. I almost squeed myself three or four times during their set and I will forever treasure the memory. I got some video but my idiot finger was over the mic for most of it so it sounds terrible. Too bad, but no video could ever, ever do justice to the mind-blowing kickassery that went on.

I put some more stuff together. I got up to the last song on this list and then couldn't take it anywhere without changing the mood, so here I will call it finished.

blink

Tracklist:
Daft Punk - Harder Better Faster Stronger (Jools MF Bandwagon Mix)
Scott Grooves - Mothership reconnection (Daft Punk Remix)
Riot In Belgium - La Musique (JBAG re-edit)
Mustapha 3000 - Kongo Thong vs Khia - My Neck My Back (acapella)
Kelis - Bossy (Switch Mix)
Martin Bros - Stoopit (Red Foxx Wamp Wamp edit)
Heartsrevolution - Crystal Castles (Acid Girls' it's no the size that matters mix)
Justin Timberlake - Lovestoned (Kaskade Remix)

Thoughts in my brain

2007-11-22T03:26:00.000-08:00

I was thinking about poetry the other day. I can't decide whether it's funnier that I thought up a theory to explain why teenagers' poetry is so bad or that I think I'm right. I also thought of a way to quantify how bad or good poetry is, but to do so you'd have to cut open the listener's brain to measure levels of hormones floating around and I don't think that you could get funding for an experiment that would kill everyone who took part in it. That being the case, you'd probably have to read poetry to mice or something, which would help us figure out what kind of poetry mice like. I don't think NSF would want to fund that one either, which is too bad for the mice.

I'm going to see Daft Punk in a few weeks. Those who don't understand how awesome this is either don't know Daft Punk or don't live in Missouri. Last time they toured through the US with the current set, it was the first time in either 9 or 10 years. I'm really lucky. I don't know how long it's been since they've gone to Japan.

Honorary Pagan

2007-10-24T05:00:00.000-07:00

I have taken part in an ancient pagan ceremony celebrating the passing of summer and welcoming the coming fall. It was pretty awesome. Saturday I had sukiyaki with the host family. One of the sons is married and has a kid, who cried shortly after meeting me despite my gift of pez. In the evening we put on special festival shirts called happi, went to the local temple, and placated the spirits by drinking lots of beer.

There were two of these mobile shrines called mikoshi, one pulled by the kids and one by the men. Women get to supervise the kids and hand the men beer at the stops. Some younger guys rode in the shrine and pounded on the drum while everyone else pulled the shrine around with ropes and by the big logs. In old times the things were carried like palanquins, and in some places still are, but ours was a smaller local festival so there weren’t enough people to carry it. It was still really heavy.

To the rhythm of the drum, everyone shouted out “yoyasa” in call-and-response fashion which means something like “make us healthy”… or something. There was a major language barrier and it’s not in my dictionary. Every now and then we would stop pulling it and everyone would sit on one side to pick the bottom of the drum up so it would be louder and the chant would change to “hitochi, hutachi, mitchu yoyasa!” (one, two, three yoyasa). More beer would be drank as we sat and shouted for a while, and then we’d ease it down and continue on. After three stops we returned back to the temple and one of the mid-20s guys pounded out a special rhythm on the taiko while everyone clapped out some other pattern and everyone yelled something.

The next day we did the same thing again in the afternoon, except this time they let me in the mikoshi and bang on the taiko for a while. When you’re at ground level it’s so loud you can feel it punch you in the chest, but when you’re in the thing itself it isn’t nearly as loud. It was terrific fun, and I was very very lucky to be invited to do it.

After that round was finished, we went back to eat dinner and then once more to the temple to make a final round. The last time, all the younger men went to one side of the mikoshi and the older men to the other, and we picked up the thing and bounced it up and down while chanting something else that I couldn’t understand but was more rhythmic and changing and awesome. After doing that like ten times we did the taiko thing once more

I had homework to do so I didn’t really want to drink, but they said that I had to have one to make me strong. After that they kept refilling my glass. I think America really needs holidays that endorse and encourage public drunkenness. I feel like it rings false and overly reverent when I say this, but the drums and feats of strengths and ritual drinking (I wasn’t lying about placating the spirits) and shouting I could sense something that was awesome, moving, and very, very old. Something very like this has been done for god only knows how many generations, stemming from primitive man screaming back in fear and defiance at the wind and the rain. This festival is by far the coolest thing I’ve done here.

Words

2007-10-22T07:29:00.001-07:00

It's really weird how "balls out" and "balls deep" mean the same thing

Bikes in Japan

2007-09-14T00:03:00.000-07:00

While I was in Hikone, I got the impression that all anyone had in Japan was these unrideable POS commuter bikes. Once in a rare while I would see someone on an honest-to-goodness road bike, once even in spandex, but I can count the number of times that occurred on one hand. Anyway, I borrowed one of the crap bikes from the school so I could go shopping and stuff, and while it was ludicrously undersized it did have a bell AND a honky horn on it, so that was alright.

Anyway, now I’m in Tokyo and I am learning that Hikone was not typical. Not that Tokyo should be seen as typical, but here there is a much greater variety of bikes. There are a lot of messengers, and they tend to ride shiny new singlespeeds, almost always tastefully colored, rather than the fashionably shitty fixed gears that you so often see in America.
They have the commuters and foldable bikes here, too, but I’ve seen some that look like they have internal gearing or something. This one was suspended in some weird way. There was one foldable bike that had monstrous pegs on it. I also saw some dude on a bianchi somethingorother.

There are also a lot of bikes made by car manufacturers here. I had heard of Cadillac bikes, but they were just a curiosity, really. I was surprised at first, but now I’m used to seeing once in a while a Chevrolet bike. The best one was this Dodge BMX bike.

“That thing got a Hemi?”
YES

I'm staying now in Osaka. There are a lot more hostess bars and a lot fewer messengers. I went to one enormous underground complex that had every kind of shopping you could imagine. One display was advertising Sharp TVs and had some silly biking on it.

Edit: I can't get it to upload. I'll try later

hot hot hot, red hot

2007-09-08T07:48:00.000-07:00

Some more music. I haven't cut this one up in to bite-sized chunks, but it's fun. I've just started to get the hang of using ableton, so this is experimental until I can get a handle on some more of the functions in the program. I have a great mix of the thong song that I wanted to get on there, but I ran out of momentum when I got to the Bjork. More will follow, I'm sure.

Tracklist:

Best Fwends - Bedroom Music
Don Rimini - Sumo and Geishas
Yuksek - Composer (Surkin Remix)
(dunno) - Knight Rider theme song
Soulwax - I Love Techno
Diplo ft. Daft Punk - Work is Never Over
Speaker Junk - Close Your Eyes (chopped by me)
Stardust - Music Sounds Better With You (Chateau Flight Remix)
Daft Punk - Musique
Bjork - Innocence (Simian Mobile Disco Remix)

Blink

Where I've been

2007-09-06T06:33:00.000-07:00

For the most part, I've been hanging out with this guy. He had a spinal cord injury when he was 18ish, and needs someone to help him get in and out of bed, to help him grab stuff from shelves, cook and feed, etc etc. Most important is helping him transition to his full-time Japanese caretakers.
"Hoteru Mayonezu"

The plane ride was uneventful. We went first class, since he had to have seats that recline fully or else he might get a deep vein thrombosis and die. He also had to have lots of room so he wouldn't get a pressure sore, or else he might die. It was fun, though. I sat down in my spacious chair with fold-out TV and 3-prong plugs, and said yes to everything the flight attendants offered me. This included extractable cheese.

The scenery was nice, but right after hte meal everyone shut their windows and tried to sleep. I stayed awake the whole time but for about 45 minutes, going on the theory that since I was arriving at a normalish bedtime I could reset my clock in one night. It's a good idea, I think, but only if you can go for a full 24 hours and then get back on schedule after 6ish hours of sleep. I don't know if it qualifies as jet lag, but I was pretty sleepy for a few days.

First class clouds.

We went to Kyoto, and there was enough in the station alone to keep us occupied for several hours. It's an amazing place from what we were able to see in the few hours we had, and I plan to go back as soon as I can.

Some artwork on the 15th floor of Kyoto station.

I'm living for the time in a little town called Hikone (that's Hee Koh Nay) in the Shiga prefecture. You can see windsurfers out on the lake fairly often. The lake itself looks different almost every day. All the trees and gardens here are very well maintainedIt has a long history, of which I'm mostly ignorant, but it has a cute little mascot named Hikonya. He and his nemesis are ALL over town. I've forgotten the other one's name, but he's often pictured with a bottle or barrel of alcohol next to him. Hikonya wears a helmet with huge horns on it, which was a distinctive feature of the warriors of Shiga prefecture.

Some kind of shrine or cemetary.

We visited the castle gardens. They were beautiful.

I'm going to Tokyo on Monday for two nights, and then to Kyoto for one night and then Osaka. After a night in Osaka, I will be meeting my lovely girlfriend at the airport. Then to Nishinomiya, a suburb of Osaka, to begin orientation and everything for school. Kwansei (Kansai) Gakuin Daigaku, which translates roughly to Kansai (western region of Japan including Kyoto and Osaka) University University.

I have lots more pictures, and keep adding to the collection. See here for more.

Food here is tasty, but I find myself craving hot dogs and beer. I haven't found hot dogs, and the 3 types of beers I've tried here they've all been pretty terrible. I miss my girlfriend

Japan!

2007-08-28T00:56:00.000-07:00

I'm here. Google can sense that I'm connecting here and puts all of its buttons and text in Japanese, so it's taking me a while to figure out how to post things properly. For now, this sign on a cafe in Osaka nat'l airport will have to do.

For Jim

2007-08-20T22:26:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Hill House

2007-08-12T16:36:00.000-07:00

I’m staying at the lovely Brady Beckham’s house for the time leading up to my departure. On top of being a really sweet deal for me financially, it happens to be the coolest house I’ve ever stayed in. Please, allow me to show you around.

8B Clarkson from the front. Note the 25 degree angle of the driveway, which makes the walk from your car to the door an actual workout, and as my bedroom is on the very top floor begins the 20 foot vertical rise between my car and my bed. That’s not my car. On the descent, the angle of the driveway makes you fling your feet out in front of you and lean wayyyy back in some comical swaggering sillywalk or else risk cartwheeling down the hill with only concrete to pad your fall. So the driveway is neat, but most of the houses on this street have something similar, so we have to go inside to see what really distinguishes it from the rest.

Following the stairs all the way up, we come eventually to the master bedroom. As befitting the master of the house, the master bedroom comes with its own private balcony, upon which you can sip scotch and smoke fine Cuban cigars while perusing the morning’s stock reports.

Right now there’s a mattress and crappy plastic shelving on it, so unfortunately I have yet to use it to its fullest.

Aside from the balcony, the bathroom is what makes this the master bedroom. Each bedroom effectively has its own bathroom, but mine is the only one where you don’t have to peek your bare ass into the hall before getting in the shower, and as far as I know is the only one with a sweet red mood light to get you ready to shit. I’m guessing it’s there because reds and blues aren’t perceived as well at night, and the red light lets you read Harry Potter with reasonable clarity while your hairy pooter (woo!) goes to work, free of any worry of the light waking your sleeping partner.

Down the stairs once more, you’ll see the weird half-door hiding a closet. A moist, vaguely assy smell seeps out from under this one, so I haven’t opened it yet.

Rounding the corner again, you’ll see the bar bearing a mural of all the former residents (from left to right: Greg, Sam, and Brady. I don’t know who the girl is) and proudly displaying the name of the manor. The Beta Sade, I guess.

More ghostly evidence of the former residents is found in the portrait over the fireplace.

The portrait is my second favorite piece of art here. The best is this cardboard cutout of a Hawkeyes coach. I don’t know his name, but he answers to Coach as well as to anything else, so Coach he is called.

You can see him here casting a watchful eye over the living room. The view from the outside is best, because he makes a creepy silhouette that looks like someone is watching you as you walk up to the driveway.

The garage is pretty neat. The residents before included two cyclists, and at least one of them left a few things behind. Add then me and my bikes, and steve and his bikes, and we’ve got a total of 11 fully functional bikes in the house, and 3 more in various stages of disassembly.

Much cooler, though, is what I can only assume is the other half of that door from upstairs, hiding a scary crawl space. With this picture you’re getting the first look in the room at the same time as me. I’ve never gone in with a flashlight for the reason that I would probably be killed by some To Kill A Mockingbird-esque freak man the second I stuck my head past the door frame.

There are other things that make this house cool. There’s never a shortage of chairs, for instance. There are four refrigerators that I'm aware of. And as my roommates are either gone all the time or hide out in their rooms all day, for all intents and purposes, I have this sweet pad to myself. Thanks to Brady, I have a room to sleep in, a driveway to stagger down, and some guy in the living room to keep me safe. Here’s to you, Brady, and your kickass house.

Ignore this post

2007-08-10T11:50:00.001-07:00

I want a pet robot

2007-06-20T22:42:00.000-07:00

They sing

I made a quick mix of around 50 minutes. It's kind of deep housey and chill, for the most part. There were a few other tracks I wanted to get in, when I got what's linked together it sounded complete. It has Michael Jackson, Cut Copy, and Grand Master Flash. I hope you enjoy it

I also got a chance to listen to that last one casually. Sometimes they're tricky; you have to listen to tiny pieces of the song scores of times to get each part right, and after a while you get so used to looking for tiny things that you forget the big ones. Like one song going from the 4th beat to the 3rd of the next rather than the 1st. Heh. I'll fix it some day.

Hopefully I'll be playing music from time to time on KCOU soon. I'll note here when I have a regular slot and am planning on putting the track lists from each show here.

2007-06-02T19:00:00.000-07:00

Here’s a mix (link). After taking far longer than I’m prepared to admit, I decided to just throw a couple more songs on to make it close to CD length and call it good. As such the last couple and first couple of songs are not mixed in as smoothly as I’d like, and there are a few places where the Acid put in a minor (very minor) stutter that I won’t be able to fix without spending more time than I’m willing. I also don’t know who the original artist for the Trouble and Bass song is. Whatever.

In other news, I think making 5 gallons of mead was a mistake. A delicious mistake, yes, but still a mistake. It’s equivalent to wine in strength and less than $2 per bottle, but the stuff is so cloyingly sweet it’s hard to get through it. It tastes like honey and alcohol, not surprisingly, so I think it would make a really good mixer for cocktails. Maybe with some pinot grigio and a couple chunklets of watermelon it could make a good sippy drink. Anyway, I’m looking for ideas to make it a little less of a chore to drink – so if anyone has one then let me know.

Lake Lifestyle

2007-05-31T15:45:00.000-07:00

I've spent the last couple of days at my parents' place at Lake Lotowana, right between Blue Springs and Lee's Summit in the burbs of KC. A picture my little sister took pretty much encapsulates every visit I have back here.

It's the most utterly relaxing time you could possibly spend anywhere. The biggest decision of the day is whether you'd rather sun yourself up by the house or down at the dock. Showers are completely optional, because the frequent dips in the lake mean that my sweat is replaced with lakewater residue every couple of hours, which is replaced in turn by new sweat residue as I strategize my time spent on the front porch and the hammock in the back yard to maximize my exposure to the sun. Every time I visit, I regain my old skills on the wakeboard for a few days at a time, then I leave for Columbia for another 3-4 months and lose them again. I really, really like it.

The real purpose of going back to KC was to get organized for a day trip down to Arkansas for some freeriding, and then to spend some face time with Mom and Dad to remind them that I’m a real person, and not just an occasional email. I accomplished both of those, and so today I regretfully packed up my shit and drove back to Columbia. I’m glad that I left when I did, though, because on the drive home I saw a dead armadillo by the roadside and a bird shitting mid-flight across the highway. I’m pretty sure that the bird was hoping to hit a car as he went by. When you fly miles and miles each day in search of whatever it is birds look for, you don’t just happen to shit on a 20 ft-wide band of concrete. Though it might be that what the birds are flying miles and miles for every day is a suitable target towards which they can fling their poo. I think that’s why we envy birds.

The purpose of this blog will be eventually to record images and experiences in Japan, beginning when I arrive in the tail end of September. Until then it will be about as exciting as any other blog you find on the internet.

Dogs, etc

2007-05-06T19:13:00.000-07:00

Sam, a Boston Terrier. Shown here sporting a fashionable antler accessory and a confused expression."

Bubba the standard poodle. The very picture of loyalty and awesome hair. His hair isn't as long now, but I wish it was.

Pen and Jake from Adventure Time