The Dress
November 23, 2005
Wow. Wedding dress companies are evil!
So here I am at this company waiting for the woman as she gets her hair done to try on some dresses. The lady helping us seems nice but after trying to sell us the merits of buying rather than renting (you get a stupid carrying bag if you buy a dress) I can’t help but despise her a little bit.
一ヶ月一万円生活
November 20, 2005
Another cool show that’s on TV often is the 一ヶ月一万円生活. It means living a month under 10,000 yen. This show pits two almost popular ‘celebrities’ against each other in a mega frugal competition.
They’re put into apartments beside each other and are given 10,000 yen in cash and nothing else. That’s roughly about $100. They must try to survive with this amount by cooking ultra cheap meals and thinking of ways to economize. They have to pay for electricity and gas as well!
This show gets a bit repetitive but it shows a lot of good ideas to save money if you’re an ultra cheapo. There’s some easy stuff like taking the lightbulb out of the fridge or cleaning the heating elements on the stove to make it more efficient. Some of the better cheapos find strange ways to save on utilities. One fellow took a ‘bath’ in the sink… for some reason.
The best part of the show is when people are cooking dinner. They can prepare a decent looking meal for under 100 yen. It’s amazing what some people can do when starting with ingredients like bread crust, some vegetables, and an egg, and a few slices of meat. I haven’t recreated any of their meals because I’m not a cheapass but it shows me that it’s highly possible to survive even in an expensive country like Japan on a super tight budget. Here are some of the recipes from the shows (in Japanese).
The show was last on on Thursdays at 7pm on channel 6 but I think it has moved to Sunday afternoons now.
Failure
November 15, 2005
Taken from Gaijin Salaryman:
google failure
1- Go to www.google.com
2- Type in “failure”, without the quotes.
3- Instead of hitting “Search” hit “I’m feeling Lucky”.
4- Look at it and laugh at what comes up.
5- Tell your friends before the people at Google Fix it.
Crossing Streets In Osaka
November 11, 2005
When crossing busy streets in Osaka (and possibly in other cities around Japan) you are sometimes greeted by a musical tune that’s supposed to help the blind guide their way. This tune is way more interesting than the chirpy noises found in other places. I noticed some people were searching for it on Google and stumbled onto my page so… here it is:
I hope helping strangers like this counts as public service.
—
I guess I should’ve had the smarts to know that the player won’t work in non-IE browsers. Here’s the WAV file for download.
Children at work
November 06, 2005
Take a look at my picture. Do I look like your fucking mother?
When I go in to work in the morning I find empty bottles, half-drunk coffees, newspapers, magazines, scrap paper, and all variety of junk in the booths. This pisses me off to no end. I find myself thowing more of other people’s junk away in a day than I throw away from my apartment in a week.
What kind of asshole leaves their garbage in a booth? What kind of asshole can’t be bothered to bring their garbage they brought in to the garbage can that’s no more than a 10 second walk away? I know the answer: these assholes are children.
Children don’t clean their rooms. Children need their screaming mothers to harass and threaten them to do their chores and put away their toys. Children don’t have the discipline, nay the common sense and courtesy to put their shit in a fucking garbage can. Therefore the assholes who do this at work are children.
I’m not the only one to be pissed off by this. A fellow in my group came to me and said, “You know I think trainers should try to enforce the rules more and get people who leave garbage in the booths”. I completely disagree with him. I am not their fucking mother. It’s not my job to make children do their chores. It’s my job to ensure development and training and evaluations and enforcement of policy. There is no policy that says, “Don’t be a fucking child”. If I have to make sure these children throw away garbage, then I should be able to discipline them like mothers. I should be able to ground them or take away their TV privileges or abuse them with chinese feather dusters (ahhh… memories). “Don’t be a fucking child” is an implicit policy that should be written into the constitution or the ten commandments or be permanently etched on these idiots’ foreheads.
Here’s what I’m going to do. I am going to find out who these assholes are. I am going to collect a bundle of garbage and I’m going to stuff it into their lockers. If their lockers are already filled with garbage which I suspect is the case, I will find a time and stuff the garbage into their backpacks and then take a piss in it.
You can litter in your apartment all you want. When you enter a place you share with countless others, don’t be a child; put garbage in its place… asshole.
Hankyu Concourse
November 02, 2005
The story’s been posted before and written better than how I would’ve. So posted with permission from blogger Robert Brady:
FAMED OSAKA CONCOURSE TO BE DESTROYED BY HANKYU
We all know how insensitive big business can be, especially when it comes to beauty in public. That seems to be particularly true in Japan, where the taste of bureaucrats and executives who can’t even choose their own neckties determines how whole cities look. Take for example what they’re doing to once elegant Kyoto, whose new train station has acquired the nickname “Stalin’s Headquarters.”? Beautiful.
Speaking of beauty, Osaka had a lot less going for it in the looks department than Kyoto, having been almost completely destroyed in the war, and postwar cram-rebuilt by businessmen and bureaucrats into the ugly duckling of Japan’s large cities, so you’d think they’d be sensitive about that at every turn, and do something in keeping with all their PR-brochure-chatter about “advancing into the future” and “making the city more attractive to tourists and residents.”
Now word comes that one of the few last bits of architectural splendor to survive the war, the Hankyu Concourse, a long high-ceilinged (in Japan!) arcade built in 1929, with chandeliers, mosaics, stained glass windows (all rarities in Japan, especially from nearly a century ago), the only oasis of genuine ambient beauty amid all the warrens of Osaka’s Umeda station (the hub station of the city), is to be destroyed by Hankyu Department Store and Densha businessmen, and replaced with an inexpensive imitation of what profiteers think is beauty, perhaps a la Disney, maybe a double-layered mall of minishops selling Hello Kitty and lesser items behind plasterboard facades with a little recycling fountain that plays relentless songs about the magic of new possessions…
As to the public who in that high, cool, elegant concourse can yet find some aesthetic relief from the general tawdry scrunch, who cares what you want?
(Website dedicated to saving the Hankyu Umeda concourse)(Japanese)
http://blog.livedoor.jp/hankyu13/
More photos, info & news (in Japanese)
http://www2.ocn.ne.jp/~norimi/hankyu1.html
http://www.alpha-net.ne.jp/users2/curoka/hqumed.htm
http://www.asahi.com/kansai/news/OSK200508100055.html
http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/nak_suzume/11243936.html
With thanks to Ron Andrews
Before they tear down this very interesting place which gives Osaka a bit of architectural deviance and spirit… with stained glass, I took a picture for my own keepsake. The Japanese people I’ve asked seem rather indifferent to all this. They look at me as if there was nothing ordinary about tearing down something that both has architectural appeal and pre-war historical significance.
Maybe Robert‘s vision of shops selling Hello Kitty stuff won’t be too bad. It’s either this or more pachinko parlours. We don’t need any more stinking pachinko parlours.
PS. I don’t know Robert other than from a quick email but his blog is way more insightful and covers more important stuff about Japan than the drivel I write about.
